Brett Slatkin of PubSubHubbub talks realtime RSS with David Recordon of Facebook, Robert Scoble of Rackspace and Kevin Marks of BT. Recorded live Thursday, September 24, 2009.

Transcript below, courtesy SimulScribe:

Mr. STEVE GILLMOR: Hi. This is Steve Gillmor and welcome to The Gillmor Gang. We’ve got, I hope, an interesting show today because we’re going to be talking as usual about whether RSS is dead. And in order to do that, we’ve convinced Brett Slatkin, the co-author or co-progenitor of PubSubHubbub to tell us what’s the status of all things speeding up RSS and getting into the real time world. And before I say, welcome to you, Brett. We also have with us Kevin Marks.

Mr. KEVIN MARKS: Hi, there. Good to see you.

Mr. GILLMOR: David Recordon of Facebook fame.

Mr. DAVID RECORDON: Hey, guys.

Mr. GILLMOR: And the infamous and I think we’re going to call Scoble the telligible Robert Scoble as oppose to the intelligible or unintelligible Kevin Marks from last week. So to the transcript writers, I’d like to introduce you to each of these four people starting with Scoble. Can you say your name, please?

Mr. ROBERT SCOBLE: Robert Scoble.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. That’s what Robert Scoble sounds like. David Recordon.

Mr. RECORDON: David Recordon.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. And that’s what David Recordon sounds like. Kevin Marks.

Mr. MARKS: I’m Kevin Marks.

Mr. GILLMOR: That’s what state your name…

Mr. SCOBLE: He was the 14th close to powerful man in British blogging history or something, I read.

Mr. MARKS: Or something. Yes.

Mr. RECORDON: Recording live from the BBC.

Mr. MARKS: Recording to the telecelegraph(ph), yes.

Mr. RECORDON: There you go.

Mr. GILLMOR: And again, and thanks so much for joining us, Brett Slatkin. Welcome.

Mr. BRETT SLATKIN: Yeah. Brett Slatkin. So thanks.

Mr. GILLMOR: So what’s the status?

Mr. SLATKIN: So the status of speeding RSS or trying to combine?

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah. Hopefully, we’ll get a little more granular, but…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, things are going well. I think we’ve seen a renewed interest in the idea of a decentralized web of information flowing between companies without anyone being in control of anything and so it’s – that idea sort of didn’t catch on and faster access is a big part of that. So PubSubHubbub is enabled for over a hundred million feeds right now which is really cool. And more subscribers are coming online pretty quickly and so it’s been really great to see people getting interested and actually writing crane doing things.

Mr. GILLMOR: All right. So what is PubSubHubbub and by the way, we have yet another misspelling of it on our – on our lower third. So…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah. So…

Mr. GILLMOR: In the tradition.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, sure. So I call it Hubbub for short. It’s easier to say. So Hubbub is a protocol that defines a way of subscribing to and publishing feed content in a way that is pushed to subscribers. So to be clear, the current model of our assess is you as a publisher, publish content and every so often, subscribers have to pull you and say hey, do you have a new content, do you have a new content? Over and over, they keep calling you. So PubSubHubbub turns this around, lets the subscriber register their interest in a feed with a hub and then what happens is every time the publisher has new information, they tell the hub and the hub goes and tells all the different subscribers. So instead of having to ask is there a new content, the hub comes to you and says yes, there is a new content and here it is. So it greatly simplifies subscribing, it makes it more efficient, and it lowers the latency of feeds from, you know, one minute, five minutes is going to be the best you can do before I can do it in about one second. So it’s really big improvement.

Mr. GILLMOR: David Recordon, what’s your opinion about this technology and its usefulness or value?

Mr. RECORDON: Oh, I mean, I think it’s been pretty clear over the past year that as people are doing more interesting things online and sharing more what other people today know, being able to do that in the more real-time fashion is really important. And so PubSubHubbub is (unintelligible) a technology, which helps make that happen and I think it’s something that is going to become a really important piece of infrastructure for the web being able to go and sort of shifted. This is an analogy that Brad Fitzpatrick used, who’s one of the other authors of PubSubHubbub. It’s the sort of like on a road trip kid in the backseat problem. They’re constantly like asking you are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet, are we there yet? And PubSubHubbub will logically sort of shift that away from somebody constantly asking you if it’s time, if there’s new content or you instead being able to say no, I’ll tell you when we’re there, in which has a bunch of benefits from an infrastructure perspective as well.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, what happens when we do get there? Then what? We’re screwed, right?

Mr. RECORDON: What do you mean? Why are we screwed?

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, are we there yet? What is the there that we’re supposed to get to?

Mr. RECORDON: So, the better analogy was the car enough. So you have somebody in the backseat asking (unintelligible)…

Mr. GILLMOR: You’re breaking up in terms of audio. I don’t know what’s going on. Is it Skype?

Mr. RECORDON: Maybe. I’m too excited.

Mr. GILLMOR: They were just throwing another lawsuit out.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead.

Mr. RECORDON: For content, right now, when you’re growing and touching feeds, when you’re trying to see if someone has created new content, you predominantly have to go and ask. Maybe you ask every 15 minutes, maybe you ask every hour, maybe you ask every five minutes. With the real-time technology is it lets you change that. So instead of you’re having to ask if something is updated, you’re able to say, I care about this piece of content. Please tell me when there’s something new.

Mr. SLATKIN: And if I may add, it’s not just tell me if there’s something new, but tell me what is new also. That’s kind of – the distinction here is, you know, it says Hubbub will come along and it’ll tell you not only are you there, but like, here’s what you’re waiting for, what you’re interested in. You know, it’s delivered right to your door, so…

Mr. MARKS: And that’s the distinction between Hubbub and the other notification protocols we’ve had like SUP and so on, right?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s pushed, so a lot of these other mechanisms lower the latency of distribution, as David explains and telling people OK, here’s the URL exchange, but they don’t actually deliver a new content and so I call the other way, you know, kind of a Ping pull where it’s still pulling, but there’s kind of a ping first before you have to go fetch the content. And what’s changed now is that it’s actually content push like real push. Data is pushed to the subscribers so they don’t actually ever have to ask for it at all.

Mr. GILLMOR: Is that clear, Kevin?

Mr. MARKS: Yeah, that makes sense to me. I think there’s been a whole series of technologies trying to solve this problem over the years from changes at XML to Ping servers to FeedMesh to SUP, to sort of unify all the updates from one site type things like (unintelligible). I think the key difference here is that this is actually sending the Fat ping, the full content of the update through in the notification. So that makes this protocol a little more complicated in that the server has to do a bit more. On the other hand, it should make the work for the clients at the other end easier because they don’t have to do the – their path through the polling fetch update. The thing is most of the feed as this moment are already doing the polling fetch update thing, so it ends up being more work for them, but hopefully this would be less work for other kinds of clients down the street. Is that a fair summation?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, I think so. I think also, it’s important to remember that the goal here is not to solve the present used cases. Feed reading on the web, it works very well right. That’s not – it’s not necessarily broken. It’s just slow, right? So what we’re trying to do is speed it up and then enable new apps to be built and then have a very fast indication, you know, and messaging protocol. And so this, you know, this idea of push is going to become more relevant as the traffic goes up more and more and as new applications come online from startups and other kind of – and other companies building, you know, new full technology on top of push that wasn’t really possible with their feed crawling the pipeline and all other stuff.

Mr. GILLMOR: Robert Scoble, jump in anytime.

Mr. SCOBLE: I’m just talking on the chat room with Bob Wyman and other people – and Mike Taylor, who’s CTO at (unintelligible) and they seemed to be saying that PubSubHubbub is doing this right. I’m just wondering, is it fast enough to create a real Twitter clone, you know, with hundreds of thousands or millions of people talking real time not in real real time, but in actual real time. And I’m wondering if it could be built – it is to build a system like that.

Mr. SLATKIN: That’s a great question. And Mike and Bob are both big XMPP guys and I’ve had a chance to talk to both of them about PubSubHubbub and how it relates to the Java messaging protocol and Java PubSub, which they both have done a lot with. So can you create an IM-style client or something, you know, that’s as fast as IM client? Absolutely. In fact, as part of our demo for the Real-Time Crunch Up with this (unintelligible), me and Bratt actually built a chat client. So we had a WordPress log on one side and a blogger on the other and we were chatting on, you know, chitchat or whatever and ended up accidentally moving over to the blogs and actually talking blog to blog. In my room, (unintelligible) I’m a blogger because it was so fast. It was – you know, it was basically the same difference. So we’ve actually accidentally sort of IMing through RSS and Atom and PubSubHubbub. So yeah, it’ll work. It’s slowly seeing up to have actually real-time conversations.

Mr. SCOBLE: Could you build an infrastructure like Amazon’s S3 or Rackspace’s Cloud to do this kind of real-time work or do you have to have dedicated servers to do it?

Mr. SLATKIN: Scoble had set me up here, man. We actually ran that demo on EasyTube. So yes, absolutely. And there are hub servers that are in development to run on premise or in the Cloud. Right now, Google runs there on app engine with the reference of limitation of the hub, but you’re going to have more and more people running their own hubs how they want in their data center and that infrastructure could be used to build that kind of experience on – yeah, whatever Cloud service or hosting service you want to use.

Mr. GILLMOR: Some people say that the PubSubHubbub architecture requires, you know, a big player in order to be able to implement and to be able to sustain. That if you have a 100 million users flowing through this stream, that’s going to require some real cloud on the engineering side. Is that accurate?

Mr. SLATKIN: Well, that’s – yeah, I think that that’s a fair concern and I think that was a fair concern maybe four or five years ago. And what’s changed since then is something called epoll. And epoll is an addition to Linux Kernel that’s been around in experimentation for probably a decade and it allows Linux Kernel to scale to, you know, hundreds of thousands of connections on a single machine. And I know that a lot of the best performing web servers out there like Twisted and most likely Tornado to – they used epoll they core in order to manage their connections and that’s what allows a single machine to scale to, you know, to very large amounts of traffic on the modern Linux Kernel. So I think that the tools are there, there are open source for anyone to use, there are similar tools in the Microsoft toolbox. I think, you know, it’s out there for people to use. Java app servers can also do it. So I think that people should take a look at epoll and modern – kind of modern networking substrates and look at the connection limits again and realize that it’s – things are new and different.

Mr. GILLMOR: Kevin, you used to be at Google and you might have one answer then. What’s you’re answer now?

Mr. MARKS: Well, I think I’ve got different answer to different places. The sample hub they built for PubSubHubbub runs on app engines, which means that you can deploy yourself on to your app engine in the sense of Google. I think someone else is building it – has built or is building one in PHP (unintelligible) they get mixed up there.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, there’s Pádraic Brady, who’s a Zend Framework, is in the progress of writing a full implementation in PHP that people are going to use. And then there are also – there’s one in Air Lang (ph) and there’s another one in Python that are making progress.

Mr. MARKS: Right. So, well, you mean – explain Python as opposed to Python on app engine.

Mr. SLATKIN: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Correct, yeah.

Mr. MARKS: Yeah, OK. So I think, you know, part of the point is, it is possible to ligate the things across from hub to hub to hub. So you’re going to have a hub that’s subscribes to another hub and they can flow through. It doesn’t require centralization and so you should be able to do some kind of pen out with that, but I’m not sure how much of that has been built yet. I think most of the things they built so far has been on the main thing server that Brett is running at Google. Is that fair or…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, I think a lot of the Google feeds are running on the Google Hub and I know that there are some – like for now, I know some big European publishers that are in the works and I think they’re going to be running their own hub. So I think that – I’m encouraging people as much as possible, use their own hub. And there are companies like Super Feeder who are running kind of hub as a service for publishers that want to have more control of the stats and that kind of thing. So I think that, you know, it’s still early days in the world of hubs and – but I’m happy to see two big ones. One in Super Feeder. I’m really happy to see one that’s independent and not connected to Google in any way and I’m especially happy to see people like Pádraic writing code that’s open source in PHP on the lap stock that anyone can run on there, its Slicehost there, Rackspace Host there, EasyTube.

Mr. GILLMOR: David Recordon, you used to be independent and now you’re at Facebook. Is Facebook going to join this parade or what do you think is going to happen as far as having some other big players to kind of take the owner (unintelligible) of the large Google penetration around PubSubHubbub?

Mr. RECORDON: I think this is something that’s come up with a lot of the different technologies Google has been creating recently. It’s like (unintelligible) greatest technologies. They’re doing a lot of the right things having building a community around them, but I think they do get that stigma of being just from Google and really benefiting Google. In terms of whether or not we’re going to adopt this specific technology, I mean, we’re always looking at – and trying to learn more about new technologies as they come out and how they could really help create better products, but we don’t have anything to talk about right now, specifically about this technology.

Mr. GILLMOR: So you don’t have any blogs to worry about speeding up.

Mr. RECORDON: I mean, I think Facebook has always had and has really, from the beginning, for a lot of services that have gone real time, has had real-time features inside of our site in terms of things like new speed being able to go and see it in real time, we definitely do fetch a lot of feeds as well.

Mr. MARKS: And of course, you have FriendFeed now, which does support PubSubHubbub.

Mr. RECORDON: Yeah, FriendFeed sort of uses that combination. It was brought up in the chat a little bit earlier, being able to use both something like PubSubHubbub and fetching feeds together. These two technologies do really get good coverage when you’re looking at all the different feeds that you need to interact with.

Mr. SCOBLE: Brett, Jessie stated and I’m interested in this, too. Have you reached out to Twitter in any way and are they – have they told you why or why not they would adopt PubSubHubbub?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yes, Jessie started to throw in their development like newsgroup or (unintelligible) that was asking for Hubbub support and they basically said that they’re happy with the APIs they have implemented today, which is their – they kind of on the streaming API. I understand that they limited resources. I’ve been there, so – I’m there right now, so I know how they feel. I think that, you know, they’re – I know that the guys in their team and I believe Alex Payne, their API Lead , they know about PubSubHubbub, they’re aware of the technical challenges of running XMPP or running a web server and supporting their own hubs. So I think that they’re definitely considering it and I don’t really know what beyond that.

Mr. SCOBLE: Could you tell me if Twitter was starting today? Would they build on PubSubHubbub or would they choose their own system to solve maybe some technical challenge that they see?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think that, you know, RSS and Atom are kind of the universal language for kind of getting across time-based data, right? So feeds of information. And the problem is that the distribution of that information didn’t have well-defined infrastructure before. So you know, if PubSubHubbub existed before Twitter builders stream API or FriendFeed builders stream API, I would like to think that they would consider using Hubbub instead because it could be a common API that all services could provide. So kind of what I’d really like to see – and we have a Wiki page on our – on the PubSubHubbub Wiki about Hubbub and Google and it basically goes in product by product and saying how we support it. And I would really love to see all those products supporting it because it’s just a common API. So as a developer, it’s a lot harder to write one off code for all these different sites. I’d like to just write my code once and just have it work for everyone and I think that Hubbub is a great way to achieve that.

Mr. GILLMOR: Is there any programming mistakes you’re seen people do when they’re first implementing PubSubHubbub that you would like to tell them not do it?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, that’s a good question. Don’t be slow. That’s the first one. We’re…

Mr. GILLMOR: What do you mean by that?

Mr. SLATKIN: Like, if you were a subscriber and it takes you 20 seconds to receive a fat Ping, you know, don’t subscribe to that much information. I think that people are overwhelmed by the stream and they don’t realize how much data we have for them. You know, we have a hundred million feeds out there. They’re changing very quickly. If you would sign up for subscription to something, you’re going to get a lot of content. So I think that people need to remember that, you know, they should make their code as fast as possible and make their processing code as fast as possible because the stream is going to get faster and faster and that’s kind of why something like Hubbub is important because we need to build a really high-quality infrastructure so that as the stream gets faster and faster, we can actually deal with it.

Mr. GILLMOR: Are there any tricks that you’ve found to dealing with that or failing properly? Let’s say your server gets slow for some reason, is there something you can do in your code to fail properly so that you don’t cause other people problems?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, that’s a good question. So I mean, the system was supposed to be as resilient as possible against any kind of failures at any part. But you know, hubs should retry delivery, so it’s the best effort – attempt to be reliable messaging and so it will constantly try to redeliver a message to you up to some number of times over some time period, you know, under a word of minutes. And so you have a chance to make sure that you don’t drop any messages on the floor, which is important. And as time goes on, that will get more and more reliable and I know that friends in Super Feeder, one of their features is the kind of the liability guarantees that you can get from using them. So they’ll say hey, I’ll always deliver the message to you no matter what happens.

Mr. GILLMOR: David, you’re – you’re going to jump in, David?

Mr. RECORDON: Yeah. I was going to say that these are some of the design decisions that went into the protocols, make it really easy for publishers and easy for subscribers and make it – so the hubs have a lot of the heavy lifting to do and that’s really just because when you think about how this ecosystem (ph) gets deployed, you have far more subscribers and mainly subscribers running on less expensive hardware and not as technically adept as you do for the hubs. The hubs can be really large with pieces of infrastructure designed to do this that know how to do it right.

Mr. GILLMOR: What’s the economic incentive for doing it right in this climate? You know, Facebook has got a business model that is, you know, moving into the black. Twitter, you know, they just got another $100 million of investment and being valued, according to the Wall Street Journal publications, at a billion dollars. You know, there’s a lot of money that appears to be orbiting this situation. Yet, what we’re talking about here is a sort of ad hoc, you know, hacker-lead, you know, hub system that’s being constructed. I mean, where is the – where are the economics of this?

Mr. RECORDON: I think a lot of the value they get with this real-time technology is being able to more quickly and more reliably distribute content that’s created within your site whether that’s a blog or a service like the Facebook.

Mr. GILLMOR: Kevin, what do you think? Is BT in this for some reason? You know, I mean, JP Rangaswami is assembling a team of geniuses to sort of rework the telecom model and the infrastructure. How are they going to play in this pond?

Mr. MARKS: I think, you know, for me, this is where the activity stream idea comes. We’ve mentioned that briefly before. The activity stream is a way of standardizing these kinds of notifications that we’re generating in Twitter, in Facebook, in MySpace and other places like that and coming up with common terminology so that we can move from one system to another. And for me, they – there’s a nice part of that in the telephony world as well because a lot of what you do with telephony is you make calls that have time stuff as you send SMS, you get voicemails. So there’s a nice overlap there between the existing stuff we have and the activity stream models that we have in these new social systems and part of that is making sure that we can fit these two ideas together. As we move stuff from – you know, telephony is real time. It requires – you know, by the (unintelligible), requires you to be talking to the person at the same time, but we have ways of extending that out to these sort of history things as well. So I think there’s a nice connection there between the stuff that used to have to be real-time, but now has history as well and these – and PubSubHubbub activity seems to have this model of here’s the stuff that’s coming now, but you can go back and fetch the feed and get the history of it as well. So the first time you sign up, you tend to fetch the feed and then subscribe to the hub so you get the last, you know, 20 or so messages there and then the new ones will come in real time. So I think there’s – it is an all or nothing. All of these work both ways and the model that we build up over the last few years with feeds is fairly resilient and robust, had communication information one site to another and the activity stream model is just trying to codify a few more specs around that so that we can do things like show when you’re posting photographs of a person or sending a link to something else, you know, and codify some of these practices have built into Twitter, into Facebook, into FriendFeed.

Mr. GILLMOR: David, you know, Facebook paid 50 million for that capability. Why would you or why would Facebook want to have that subsumed by an open activity stream system? I mean, what did you spend all that money for?

Mr. RECORDON: I think you’re actually looking at the wrong way, Steve. I mean, the value…

Mr. GILLMOR: I hope so. That’s the idea.

Mr. RECORDON: (Laughing) The value these of services is – I mean, Facebook is always at it and as we say it, being able to connect and share with the people that you know, with your friends, and being able to go and use activity streams as a way to understand the type of content that’s being created, as we might be pulling it in or pushing it out somewhere else, and then being able to do that in a real-time fashion. It really goes back to that core goal of helping people connect and share.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. So what did you 50 million for?

Mr. RECORDON: I mean, it’s only my first, like, few weeks here.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, yeah. You’re just following orders, in other words.

Mr. RECORDON: (Laughing) Oh, I don’t think…

Mr. GILLMOR: Seriously, I mean, where’s the – what’s the economic rationale for spending this money? I can think of a number of reasons like, you know, that the one billion valuation of Twitter is actually a stalking horse for the – maybe eight billion valuation of Facebook as opposed to four billion, which is what the current market numbers reflect. I mean, there’s something going on here that is being – this is about Twitter and Facebook with Google on some level, you know, sort of swarming around them coming at this – you know, at the value proposition of the activity stream and the filtering that’s going to on around it. I mean, this is big business, evidently. If the Wall Street Journal sends an alert out, I mean, usually the alert is the General Motors is, you know, in bankruptcy and today’s alert was that Twitter is now worth a billion dollars. I mean, what’s going on here?

Mr. RECORDON: Well, I think, I mean, one of the most valuable features of Facebook has been the stream ever since we launched it. It’s a great way to know what your friends are doing and see a lot of that. Earlier this year, we updated the feeds, become real time, and really show you everything that’s going on along with – and the highlights, we’re trying to pull out some more of that. So I agree with you in the sense that being able to see what people that you know are doing is really important and something that a lot of people do every single day. I don’t think I’m the right person to talk about exactly why we purchased FriendFeed or not.

Mr. GILLMOR: But you can talk to the fundamental question because as a technologist, you’re interested in scale, in reaching large numbers of people with, you know, the capability of being able to use that as a way of generating, you know, economic value. However, that’s perceived at the other end of the value chain. You know, this stuff is clearly moving from, you know, Kevin’s and your, you know, standards body or open standards work. It’s moving into some very big players. I mean, the people who are in the investment round with Twitter is a – it’s a mutual fund. I mean, since when the mutual funds get involved in a business that hasn’t had a dime of revenue? And the same thing for Insight, I believe it is, which is a private equity firm. I mean, there’s something going on here that is substantially different than what we’ve seen today. Go ahead.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah. So Steve, I think – to take us back and kind of give David a chance to breath, I think that the…

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, good try, but…

Mr. SLATKIN: (Laughing) It’s important to remember that open standards aren’t at odds with economic incentives. If anything, open standards are an economic incentive. So the ability for Facebook and Twitter and Google and Flickr and on and on, all these services, Windows Live, for them, all inter-operates. It’s really best for everyone the same way that the internet itself through interoperability was really good for everyone and good for all the companies that participated. So I think that the economics here are easy integration plus engineering effort put in together, access to more information from all different sources, on and on and on, you know, and then doing it in a way that’s more efficient and scalable so that going forward, we don’t have to keep throwing a lot of money at the problem in terms of engineering effort and machines and whatnot. So I think that it’s important to think about what we’re enabling here, you know, the new used cases, the new apps will be built on top of Twitter, the new apps will be built on top of the Facebook screen that we haven’t really considered before that will render, you know, a tremendous amount of value for these companies and hopefully get those BC’s, some of the dollars back.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, it’s not the BC’s that are jumping in, that was my point.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, or your, you know, Four One K. Whatever happens to be on the, you know, aiming the balance.

Mr. GILLMOR: All right. So, you’re sounding off a lot like Dave Winer(ph).

Mr. SLATKIN: Which part that sounds like?

Mr. GILLMOR: The part about, you know, standing up for the little guy. I mean that’s what I find fascinating about PubSubHubbub and what Dave is doing with RSS club is that they’re not all that different in terms of their goals as well as the technology. You’ve got a chart that you put together which explores the differences and similarities between not only those two particles, I guess, but others like Sub and so on. Can you sort of give us a sort of an overview of what you’re trying to accomplish with that?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah that’s, thanks. So, I think that, I agree that the goal here is, you know, decentralization in the sense that we can all speak the same language and interoperate and that no one is controlled of the data stream completely. And if you think about the internet itself, it was founded on this principal of openness and open protocols and you know, HEP and HTML and TCP even all these protocols were open for people to look at and implement and improve over time. And that’s been really valuable to creating Internet, making it the way it is. So, you know, decentralization is at the core of what the Internet is and why it’s valuable. So one of the other things that to keep in mind though along with decentralization is scalability. So, you look at the IP protocol they talk about Vint Cerf and how he helped build it, you know, back in the 60′s essentially. TCP is the same way. So, the point is that there are these protocols that have been built over the last, you know, 40 years that’s still hold up today. And now that we’re thinking about real-time at Internet scale so that, you know, maybe my mom will take advantage of real-time and be on how she already does on Facebook. You know, we need to build a foundation that’s solid enough that it will keep kind of scaling. So my document which is of the PubSubHubbub Wiki called Comparing Protocols gets into why polling and ping-polling aren’t going to be good enough and why we really need to use fat pinging which is another term for push to make this work. And PubSubHubbub is one fat pinging protocol, XMPP whichever(ph), pubsub is another one and they’re both have their trade offs. And so, it’s really important to understand the technical details of what we’re setting ourselves up for. But I think that a simple kind of tag line is, you know, fat pinging, do it for the children, you know. I think that – I think that we need to build infrastructure that 40 years from now people will look at and say, OK, you know that, that’s going to withstand the test of time.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, speaking of children, Robert, congratulations.

Mr. SCOBLE: Hey, thanks. I’ll go get little Ryan and bring him up here a little later.

Mr. GILLMOR: Excellent. So, how’s the chat room going? Do you see anything there?

Mr. SCOBLE: It’s going interesting. We are arguing about whether what Twitter’s rules are on re-broadcasting of the firehost feed and it’s clear that Twitter doesn’t allow you to rebroadcast the entire feed but FriendFeed figure that way around that, right? They are allowed to rebroadcast anybody who signed in to FriendFeed from Twitter. So if you got everybody on Twitter to sign up for FriendFeed, you would see the full firehost feed being displayed too but of course not everybody from Twitter is going to sign up for FriendFeed, so it’s a subset at best.

Mr. RECORDON: Let’s go up a level one(ph).

Mr. SCOBLE: That’s part of the point. Yeah, I’m sorry.

Mr. RECORDON: I mean, I was just going to say like there are five or six of us who are chatting live in real-time using video. Well then, another you know like 20 people are going in also in real-time chatting and we’re able to just play back and fourth. I mean, see if going back to your question about sort of like what’s the economic incentive. Like this is just completely changing how people communicate and like that’s what’s really cool about everything that’s happening right now.

Mr. SCOBLE: I think the economics are going to be interesting because like the guys who run big sites like CNN and stuff are really starting to figure out that they’re gifting a lot of free advertising to Twitter by saying on CNN, you know, go to twitter.com/CNN. That’s a gift of the advertising dollars to another brand and they would love to have their own little Twitter where they could say go to CNN.com/twitter and join our Twitter-thing and that way they keep a better touch point with their customer. And if they build a system that integrates in the Twitter and some real – fundamental in real way which as what it looks like this technology will let us do then also you’re going to see a lot of economic activity like that.

Mr. GILLMOR: You are saying something Kevin.

Mr. MARKS: So, I was saying the point is not – is that this isn’t trying to build the firehost, this is trying build the (unintelligible) thing way only get the updates that you want to the piece that you’re subscribing to. You’re not trying to get the entire output of every site and then run stuff over it, you’re trying to just say, I’m interested in this subset of it, I’m following these people, I’m following the streams, and I want those to flow through to me rapidly while than having to build the infrastructure to read the entire flow from every site and then fill that stuff out. There’s a different kinds of problems and the point of this is – is…

Mr.GILLMOR: Well, it’s a philosophical. It’s a philosophical transition as well. I mean, you know, the advantage of our assess was phenomenal, you know, in its inception because it solves the problem of, you know, the guy on the commercial the famous commercial where he sits back and says OK, I just finished the Internet, he read everything. There’s no way to read everything. So, you have to start to apply, you know, an individual Fallow architecture to that. And then what Twitter brought in was the ability to be able to, you know, gang up overlapping Fallow Fields the sort of three degrees of separation that comes from not only following the people that you’re interested in but the people that they’re interested. One of the algorithms in FriendFeed has that capability of essentially bringing to your attention the comments by people that I’m following like for example.

Mr. SPARKS: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: I see a lot of that. That’s, you know, Robert has talked about this extensively for a number of years. So, you start to develop this social graph view into the information space which is, you know, I think extremely powerful and it was – is really representative of what this transition is ultimately going to fuel which is a far more efficient and, you know, human powered environment.

Mr. SCOBLE: The chat room just raised up a good point. What happens, let’s say you have a 100, 000 restaurants all using PubSubHubbub and they’re using a decentralized Twitter-like system to communicate, is there any way to do a track so I can go through all 100, 000 restaurants and look for keywords and have keywords bring back information or do I have to follow all 100, 000 restaurants and then put then put them into a database of some kind and then do might search that way?

Mr. SLATKIN: So, I think – yeah. I think, I can – I like to address all these together because I think you guys are asking the same question in a bunch of different way. So, Kevin’s point was that with technologies like Hubbub that let’s you kind of focus in on the topics that you’re interested in. And then Steve you are saying well Friendfeed, you know, Twitter will take you or social graph of your friends and it’ll maybe expand that out one or two more separations and then it’ll let you kind of follow information that you know, so your focus is a little broader. And then Robert, what you’re talking about is having you know basically looking at the whole firehost in some kind of geographical location. So…

Mr. SCOBLE: Well, not geographical. I want to try a key word.

Mr. SLATKIN: Sure.

Mr. SCOBLE: I want to see everybody on these 100, 000 restaurants who mentions the word sushi for instance.

Mr. SLATKIN: Right, totally. So,what I’m saying is that we’re kind of defining the spectrum of cost where for focus engagement it’s very, with something like PubSubHubbub it will be very low cost for you to keep track of focus engagement or even raising the focus like Steve explained to, you know, to grow a little bit. But it will be more expensive to track the fire host and this is true with keeping up with the Twitter feed also. Not everybody can do it. You need a, you know, special contract in order to get it. There’s a lot of load coming through and same thing goes for stuff like the 64 (ph) Adam stream. Not everybody can handle it. So, I think that people – people will handle it and there will be companies that want to do to kind of track-like functionality but they’re going to need to spend a lot of resources in able to handle that stream. And that stream is going to be large no matter what the underlying protocol is and it’s going to keep getting larger and larger and larger. So, what PubSubHubbub let’s you do is kind of pull out more focus pieces of that stream in efficient way. But you can still get the aggregated view and something that I’ve heard people are working on in multiple places is something like the Twitter trending topics for the whole Internet. So basically, I would subscribe to every single Hubbub feed on the planet and then watch the data as it goes by and do track on it or do whatever kind of analysis you want to do and there’s nothing stopping you from doing that and, you know, it will work efficiently at scale.

Mr. GILLMOR: But how does that get built out, you know, sort of federated track model? I don’t think we’ve actually heard anybody define how that might work. There were some early talk about that in the identical days but I don’t see how. You know, all roads are eventually are going to lead to whether it’s in memory or not. There’s going to be some sort of database of information that has been drawn upon. How do you get there?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah. So, I think that you’re asking about processing pipelines. So, you know, we can – I think that Hubbub will get you the information, XMPP can get you the information. You know, there are bunch of proprietary solutions like TIBCO(ph) that will get you data really fast. Analyzing a data pipeline is a lot more complicated and there are some companies out there. I think one of them is called SQLstream that do – and this is kind of the final frontier database design. NSQL is doing real-time analysis, real-time queries on data as it moves. It’s been a research topic for 10, 15 years as I understand it. It’s slowly getting more and more actual kind of investment and then build out. But you know, this is a great economic opportunity for entrepreneurs out there to build federated real-time systems, whatever they maybe. A used case that’s really interesting I think is take that 100, 000 restaurant example and now, you know, let’s say that someone could get the federated fire host across all of these different sites and publishing systems and vendors and whatever. And let’s say this, you know, takes a thousands Hubs and a 100, 000 or 10, 000 different hosting providers. Now, I get a federated fire host. If I want to provide a good news or experience maybe I want, you know, real time over related those reviews depending on my current location. That’s a hard problem to solve, no matter what you’re using to transport, right? XNBP, PubSubHubbub or just plain RSS. It’s difficult problem to solve. So, I think there will be some really pull apps that people are going to build to handle the information overload and this problem kind of transcends the deep technical foundation. And if anything having a strong technical foundation will unable more data to flow and cost more we need to filter it. So, I think that – yeah, this is going to be really interesting to see what people build to fix that.

Mr. GILLMOR: Kevin.

Mr. SCOBLE: Well, Twitter is certainly adding on new Metadata to try to help with filtering. You know, they’re turning on any day now re-twitting which will work like liking in FriendFeed which we know how that helps you filter, right? We can go through FriendFeed and say show us all the items about or with the word Obama in the title that have 15 likes and that have been like first lane by Steve Gillmor, you know. That’s really powerful filtering that we don’t have on Twitter yet. They’re turning on location API’s as well that we’re going to be able to search, you know, instead of just saying show me the Hudson River plane crush, we can say show me only Twits within 25 miles of the Hudson River plane crush, that’s really powerful filtering that will be available to us in the future. It’ll be interesting to see how PubSubHubbub systems deal with that.

Mr. SLATKIN: So, you can do that. The thing is you can do that today with certain feeds available over PubSubHubbub and just RSS and Adam. There is GUR(ph) assess which is an extension to the feed protocols that defines the location tag. There is the viaLink(ph), define the Adam spec(ph) that lot of people use to point back in the original, so like a re-Twit(ph). So, I think that the – all the pieces you just mentioned, although Twitter is going to get the user experience right. Definitely, I think that the foundation as a developer is there to build that in a decentralized way.

Mr. SCOBLE: I’m not even sure that they’re going to get the user experience right. They’re going to…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, I’m saying –

Mr. SCOBLE: They’re going to piss people off of their new re-Twit because you can’t comment in it. And, you know, we have yet to see what it looks and how it works.

Mr. SLATKIN: Well, you know, people are using Twitter a lot. And so, you know, they must like something about it. And I’m saying that the user experience probably part of that so I would imagine that they will be able to service it first similar to how FriendFeed kind of had (unintelligible)…

Mr. GILLMOR: Whether they service it or one of their third parties.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yes.

Mr. GILLMOR: So, this is it. I mean, that’s historically that’s been truer than Twitter. They have needed to do it as part of the reason that they’ve gotten so successful. David, why did you go to Facebook instead of Twitter?

Mr. RECORDON: I never even thought about joining Twitter while I was there. I mean, I joined Facebook because of all the really interesting problems that are being solved here, and sort of where my interest oblige as I spent the past few years working on technology around social networks, and where else would I go.

Mr. GILLMOR: Right. So I mean, some of these interesting problems you’re talking about are probably around the area of UI and how you manage these kinds of opportunities. We’ve been talking about a large scale, the hundred thousand user or the hundred million dollars, you know. But, just the ability – I mean, this has been talked about before on the show today. You know, the fact that we’re able to use this reasonably and in some cases completely low cost technologies, and be able to wire up something that allows us as individuals to be able to create this, you know, overlapping follow clouds that we can leverage for having real time conversations. I mean, we all happen to be in the valley on this call, but it’s really no different when somebody comes in from London or anywhere on the planet. So the ability to be able to level – to leverage this at a micro community level, I think, is the real element(ph) in the room here. And I think what I’m hearing is that the infrastructure is now available to do this in many different ways which is going to drive an economic kind of acceleration where the cost has driven down and the value is distributed more widely to people in general. So I’m wondering if that’s what your vision and understanding is of what Facebook is as an opportunity to do, and if that’s why you’re there.

Mr. RECORDON: I mean, I completely agree with you to certainly. Personally about that of what these tools and what these technologies ultimately enable is people being able to communicate with each other better, and I mean, going to the example that I gave like 10 minutes ago about just what we’re doing right now of being able to go and how video streaming between five or six different people, how to build real time conversation from a chat room which I have out behind my site window being able to see all that interact back and forth. This is a really interesting and exciting time for to really be able to help and influence out internet continues to develop and move forward.

Mr. GILLMOR: Speaking of exciting times. We’re about to have the debut of RSS. So who is that person?

Mr. SCOBLE: This is Ryan Soroush Scoble, RSS and Rocky is here too.

Mr. GILLMOR: So Rocky, hold the baby.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCOBLE: Rocky is a softie. You didn’t know that did you? Anyways, lots of fun in my lives.

Mr. GILLMOR: So did, what did you reach for as your social interface at his birth, Robert?

Mr. SCOBLE: Well, I used a bunch of different things. I used FriendFeed. I used Twitter to get – because most of my audience is still on Twitter. I used Flickr to get photos out. I used mvideo by the way. And what else did I use?

Mr. GILLMOR: Did you use an iPhone or a flip phone?

Mr. SCOBLE: iPhone.

Mr. GILLMOR: A flip phone, OK.

Mr. SCOBLE: iPhone because, you know, when you’re – well, I was using a 5D as well. So I had a 5D and an iPhone. The 5D is for the high quality video and high quality pictures for my own family album. The iPhone let me get it out – the word get out to the world while it was happening so.

Mr. GILLMOR: I think you mentioned that the sequela(ph) is at the hospital you’re in.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: Did they were decked out with a Wi-Fi?

Mr. SCOBLE: They were but it was like a Wi-Fi in China. They had a lot of sites blocked. In fact, a lot of the video sites were blocked, but Flickr wasn’t so…

Mr. GILLMOR: Why they’re blocked? Do you think?

Mr. SCOBLE: Because I think – I think, they were trying to protect their bandwidth from people who are downloading porn in the rooms and stuff like that.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. SCOBLE: Now, a lot of the media sites were block and a lot of the porn sites were blocked. So, I think, they were using a standard package that just let people block a bunch of different. It was a like a net nanny kind of site, you know. It’s the site block.

Mr. GILLMOR: Speaking of a strange spamming. I got a direct message the other day from somebody. I think it was yesterday. Who clearly I had no idea who that person was and I never – they’re trying to sell me something. Has anybody else seen that problem?

Mr. SCOBLE: I haven’t, but I saw a lot of talking about it.

Mr. MARKS: And other sites had lots of…

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, and what’s going on there? It sounds like that somebody has figured out how to be able to hack into the direct message network and talks to people who haven’t reciprocally followed them.

Mr. MARKS: No. I thought it was a fishing attack, so that people you are following are sending messages under their name. That what was going on there, but…

Mr. GILLMOR: So I did follow this person even though I didn’t recognize the name.

Mr. MARKS: Right. And the message was actually sent by them. They click on a link and that link sent the message out.

Mr. GILLMOR: No. I understand that. I still think…

Mr. MARKS: That’s a good example of what when you want to have a distributed system that’s decentralized so that not everyone is affected by the same cross sites rifting attack at the same time. So I think, you know, I think Dave was right saying that our RSS no fair well because not every, you know, not every front ad will be other goes…

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MARKS: Not every, you know, not every front ad will be other goes can – not every one to make the same mistake, you know. People want things differently and they have, you know, a different security of limitations and…

Mr. GILLMOR: So in other words, we want to have a hundred million companies all losing money instead of having.

Mr. MARKS: We don’t really know. They are private company. But you know, we want to have – we want to have people participating in a stable wealth and see what follows from that. And I think that requires decentralization and good infrastructure.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I’m not so sure. I think decentralization is over sold. It’s kind of like a unicorn. It’s like, you know, their exploits are well known but no one’s ever succeed in capturing one.

Mr. RECORDON: Oh, I think, if you look at the…

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, go head Kev.

Mr. MARKS: Nonsense. The way…

Mr. GILLMOR: Oh by the way, the (unintelligible) is open, Kevin.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MARKS: Inside Job did last week show.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.

Mr. MARKS: Did decentralize web, you know, is what we built on? That’s the stuff that works. Is this the protocols that, you know, the web is in agreement. That’s the praise pulled down and put together which push it very well, which is we agreed to use the same protocols to exchange stuff. Therefore, you can interact right with people not only without having a business relationship with them, without even knowing they exist because you’re using the same protocol. And that is the priorities and that’s why it scales out to vast dimensions.

Mr. RECORDON: It’s very easy to join. Yeah.

Mr. MARKS: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: I understand what the logic. I mean on a simple level, the entire web is completely decentralized. It’s about multiple computers connected to each other. So I understand that, but the economics of it and the use of the word decentralize as an alternative to a commercial venture. I think is in sophistry (ph). I don’t think it exists. I think, everything is a commercial venture and everything is decentralized. So what is the point here?

Mr. MARKS: The point is it’s not – it will change to a commercial venture. Not saying the combi commercial ventures that building these protocols. Obviously, they can be. The point is saying, you don’t have to first get permission from someone to use it, that’s the difference, right?

Mr. GILLMOR: Let’s follow that logic for a second. What permission? Who do I have to get permission to do anything on the web? When I’m on Gmail, I have to get permission from Google or else my sign in does not work and I can’t get access to all of my data. It has been trap there for the last 48 hours.

Mr. SLATKIN: I think that you need to – I think that Kevin is talking about at a server level. So if I want to run an SNTP server as my own mail host and send email through Gmail account. Gmail will take that email and deliver it to its recipient. So I don’t have to ask them for permission. I just need to speak to protocol and behave – behave correctly.

Mr. GILLMOR: Right and I would suggest that the reason that that is possible is not necessarily because of some virtuous, you know, religion regarding decentralization as responsible. It happens because it’s good business for Gmail to do that.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yes.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. So…

Mr. SLATKIN: These principles go hand and hand, I think, that decentralization is good for business. Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: Right. So you know, it’s not either or proposition.

Mr. SLATKIN: Not at all.

Mr. GILLMOR: And sometimes, portrayed as that politically and that’s my objection to the use of decentralization as a religion.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, I think that’s really a good point ‘cause I think that, yeah, they usually – they put it on to each other it’s, you know. But I think that – I think that it’s more just a question of, you know, letting anyone come to the pool and swim there whatever. It’s not at odds with the corporate plan or making money. It’s actually a way to gain network effects on products, so that they grow larger and so HTML had amazing network effects and got every company involve and it’s growing, growing, growing, growing. So that was – that’s why it took off and it was good commercially for every one because they kind of ride away for long.

Mr. GILLMOR: We’ve lost, David. I’m not sure whether or not.

Mr. SLATKIN: I think he had to go.

Mr. GILLMOR: It’s purposeful, really.

Mr. MARKS: He said he had to go, yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK, thanks. Well, then, let’s start to wean this down. Brett is there any kind of misconception that you feel has been push forward about PubSubHubbub or conversely. Is there anything that you would like to say about to some of the other protocols and strategies that are out here regarding this, I mean. This is an opportunity I think for you to express something about just the general area, not just your work in it.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah. I think that, well, so specifically to have – I think that (unintelligible).

Mr. GILLMOR: Let’s start again. You’re kind of like – try it again please.

Mr. SLATKIN: Hanging. There you go. I’m back in business.

Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead.

Mr. SLATKIN: Sorry about that.

Mr. GILLMOR: You said you were at Twitter. Are they trying to choke your bandwidth?

Mr. SLATKIN: I think so and I don’t why.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. Say it again.

Mr. SLATKIN: I was saying that there’s a misconception that Hubbub is controlled by Google and that’s not true. I think that people need to come and participate in open specifications like activity streams and like PubSubHubbub with open mailing list and the open process for getting new stuff added to the specs. So that’s a kind of misconception for me specifically. Generally, I think that people don’t understand that light pinging isn’t going to work. I think that as a developer, when you take a naïve approach and you think about that for 30 seconds. You like, oh yeah, light pinging that should work. But if you actually sit down and think through it and think about scalability and remember what you learn about TCP back in your, you know, classes or not. You realized that it just won’t work. It’s just not going to fly overtime. And you know, we need to – we kind of need to do to strike the right balance between complexity and performance. And I think that so – I think that light pinging a lot of time, it seems really simple but it’s just doesn’t do you good enough job. And so I encouraged people to look at some of the things that I wrote. And there’s a long history of the stuff in just protocol design in general for the last 40 years that talks about push and why it’s good. And you know, Scott (ph) had read it and understand that, you know, we need to do better or else we’re not going to be able to keep growing the stream effectively.

Mr. GILLMOR: So I’m hearing two things. One is that you need to have a rigorous continued influx of new blog. So that this is in proceed as a special Google project or any kind of (unintelligible) strategy. But at the same time, you need to be able to take advantage of heavy lifting that can probably only be done by those kinds of companies.

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, I think that – in second part. It’s not heavy lifting. That’s my point. It’s the difference between, you know, lifting your pinky finger and your index finger. It’s really not that much more complicated but initially you might say, Oh, that’s more complex. But it really – it really is actually very simple and anybody can do it. You can do it on your $5 a month share costing environment with PHP and my sequel. You can even do it on free hosts. So I think that – I think that anybody can do it. So that’s kind of not the problem. The problem is that at the surface when people first look it, you know, Apple and Orange, they think their, you know, they think that something like fat pinging is actually more complicated and I guess what Hubbub tries to get across is that it doesn’t actually have to be. So people who are turned off by Java(ph) PupSub or any kind of other push protocol in the past should look at, you know, Hubbub and other, you know, new protocols and say, well, does this make it easier for me? And I think it does. I think that it’s easy and efficient. And as for the new blog, yeah, we have a lot of new blog coming in and more new blog is welcome. I want everyone to participate. I get so much great feedback, you know, like me and Brad both get a lot of great feedback from the whole community of people from different countries and languages and backgrounds and program and languages, and it’s just really cool. This community that’s been growing and I love when people call polls in the spec, I love when people challenge, they never try to present about why it’s necessary…

MR. GILLMOR: Give me an example of a whole that we spoke and how you fixed it.

Mr. SLATKIN: Well, the best example I think is what Bret Taylor did at FriendFeed. He said, you know what, I’m not satisfied with the security model of how hubs delivered to subscribers. He wanted a higher level of kind of trusts that a message received from the hub was authentic. And so, he suggested a way to do it and we went and implemented it and we went and talked around with other people on the thread, on a bunch of threads on the mailing lists, and you know, we kind of reach the consensus about the way it should work, and then the 0.2 version of the spec added that suggestion to the spec. So you know, this is the idea originated with Bret Taylor. And you know, while he was a FriendFeed independently and then ended up in this spec that we’re all working out. So, and it’s a great addition to the spec and absolutely necessary and…

MR. GILLMOR: So, what is the spec that you’re all working on and how are we going to be assured that there’s a reasonable level of interoperability among the important players?

Mr. SLATKIN: Great, great question. So you know, the spec is linked off to the PubSubHubbub website. So, if you just seach for PubSubHubbub or pubsubhubbub.googlecode.com. It’s misspelled at the bottom there, it has 2 b’s. But if you go search for that…

MR. GILLMOR: You weren’t listening, I said that it’s (unintelligible).

Mr. SLATKIN: I know, yeah. And then…

MR. GILLMOR: Real time error.

Mr. SLATKIN: Real time errors. So if you look at there, it’s linked up from there. The mailing list is also linked up from there, and as for interoperability, we have a test that was written by Jeff Lindsay of Webhooks fame who particularly for people to verify the behavior of their hub. And that needs more work too, but the idea is there will be Compliance Suite that you can run against your code to verify that it works properly just like this Compliance Suite for any well defined spec.

MR. GILLMOR: Now, do you think Kevin that this is going to get hooked in with some of the activities for yourself?

Mr. MARKS: Actually, it did. Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: Okay, can you explain how?

Mr. MARKS: Well, activity stream is a feed. It’s an item feed that contains actions, you know, some bit of extra mark up to expressed up in more detail. So it plugs in imperfectly just take the feeding process radio system. So, that there’s no, you know, there’s no reason that would not happen until…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, it works today.

Mr. MARKS: Yeah, one thing I’d like to ask Brett is have you looked at hooking up, decide what key stuff to this? I know you’re imposing any (unintelligible) by me…

Mr. SLATKIN: Yeah, yeah. So, and Bob Wyman mentioned on the public thread what would be required to do that and yeah, I mean I think that it would be great to hook that up. I think, that there’s a whole (unintelligible) filled products that we need to put this on and that’s definitely one of them, one of more interesting ones. I think that making it to that content can be federated in access by everyone and real time is really important or else it cannot seem shallow and so that’s something we need to do definitely. But, I don’t know when that’s going to be in time in terms of timeframe.

Mr. GILLMOR: What about an interaction with Wave?

Mr. SLATKIN: Yes, so that’s a good question, and I get that question pretty often. So Wave and Hubbub both do push in terms of content, so it’s good for the children as I was saying. Wave does it in a way that’s more complicated because they need more richness to express the amazing user experience that they have. Hubbub just feeds pushing around. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t use Hubbub as a transport for Wave data or vice versa, so…

Mr. GILLMOR: That’s a replacement for XMPP or…

Mr. MARKS: I’m a bit skeptical. Yeah, well…

MR. GILLMOR: Or on one side?

Mr. ARKS: But there’s a difference right? Because…

Mr. SLATKIN: Absolutely there’s a difference, yeah.

Mr. MARKS: Wave is trying to have your (unintelligible) to be edit the same document so he was sending operation transforms where it actually edits to the same thing.

Mr. GILLMOR: Right.

Mr. MARKS: So, you need to have that document you’re reconstructing somewhere. So yeah, you could feel into pieces of pushing through PubSubHubbub and put it back together again, but you still need the little pieces to flow in. So, I’m not sure of that. And this is part of the problem that, you know. Wave is saying, okay, our structure model is (unintelligible) should have seen the same document. It’s not his flow event is coming from one place to another. So that’s why it doesn’t mix very well with these systems. And then…

Mr. SLATKIN: Well, so I think that at a user experience level, what you’re saying, make sense. But I think that in terms of the actual like implementation in the protocol, you know, Wave basically is just Java PubSub to move, you know, transforms the document between all the people who are participating. And what I’m saying is that you could do that same transport with something like Hubbub, it would be possible. Now, I think that XMPP is better in that case because it’s even faster than Hubbub it can be and has a much organized scaling property. So, that’s why Wave has gone in the direction they have, I think. But, I’m saying that there isn’t an impedance mismatch between the two protocols. You could have them together.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK.

Mr. SLATKIN: Whereas, you know, you couldn’t hook together and changes XML file and Wave very easily. That would be a lot more complicated, you know, the thing falling approach doesn’t, you know, doesn’t mesh well with push. If you want to get data in real time, you want to push it. But, that’s not what I’m just trying to say.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. Robert any last question? OK.

Mr. SCOBLE: Not really.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK. This is Steve Gillmor. This has been the Gillmor Gang. I want to thank Brett Slatkin, I want to thank Kevin Marks, I want to thank David Recordon, and I want to thank Robert Scoble and I especially want to thank Rackspace for sponsoring the show and all their fine work. And NewTek and their incredible TriCaster which is helping us print this to you. So, we’ll see you again next time and there will be a next time. Bye-bye.

The Gillmor Gang explored location’s role in new social media platforms. MG Seigler, Kevin Marks, and Robert Scoble are joined by socialmedia.com’s Seth Goldstein. The transcript starts below the video.

STEVE GILLMOR: Hi, this is Steve Gillmor. Welcome to the Gillmor Gang. We’re going to have a discussion today about why RSS is still dead – no we’re not. We’re going to have an elliptical discussion which will end up being about that. And to join us, we have the newest regular of the Gillmor Gang, MG Siegler. Welcome, MG.

Mr. MG SIEGLER: Hey, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Mr. GILLMOR: Great for you to be here. MG of course, for TechCrunch fans, is the guy who has single-handedly changed TechCrunch from being a daily newspaper to being a minute-by-minute site.

Mr. MG SIEGLER: Almost real-time.

Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t know how he does it, but, I don’t really want to know. And joining us as usual, thank God these days, is Kevin Marks.

Mr. KEVIN MARKS: Hi, there.

Mr. GILLMOR: Hi.

Mr. MARKS: Are we all black and white today?

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. MARKS: Is there a retro going on here?

Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t know what to tell you. It’s all there on the network, so, I don’t know what you’re looking at. We’ll check that out later. And our special guest today, Robert Scoble, are you there on the phone?

Mr. ROBERT SCOBLE: Yeah, I’m on the phone in my car.

Mr. GILLMOR: Ok, so, what’s the baby news?

Mr. SCOBLE: Maybe Saturday, not today.

Mr. GILLMOR: So you – what’s the name of the baby?

Mr. SCOBLE: Ryan Soroush Scoble, R.S.S.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, there you go. (laughing)

Mr. SCOBLE: (laughing)

Mr. GILLMOR: Puts the light to that, doesn’t it?

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: Ok, great. It’s a little hard to hear you so, I’m going to see if we can give you a little bit more level here. Give me a test.

Mr. SCOBLE: Testing, one, two, three, four, five. Hopefully you can hear me.

Mr. GILLMOR: All right, that’s better. And well, less of me and then our special guest coming to us, formerly of the land of attention and maybe gestures and now bring the light to the notion that social media is dead, Mr. SocialMedia.com, Seth Goldstein.

Mr. SETH GOLDSTEIN (CEO, SocialMedia Networks): Social media is dead long live gestures.

Mr. GILLMOR: Ok, well, we’ll explore that. I don’t think it’s dead but the scene that had Caroline McCarthy, I believe is her name, had a really good story about how everything seems to have matured in the social media space as evidenced by TechCrunch50. MG, what’s your thought on that article and in general, are we seeing the maturation, pardon the expression, of all things social media?

Mr. SIEGLER: I didn’t catch that specific article just yet, but, I mean, in general just, I mean, I think, yeah, things are going up. We’re seeing Facebook making actual money now so that’s certainly something for it.

Mr. GILLMOR: Hmm, that was one data point.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right.

Mr. GILLMOR: What else?

Mr. SIEGLER: Well, now it’s got Twitter at a billion dollar evaluation, so that’s another interesting thing, right?

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, who says, I mean, somebody told Mike Arrington that but we don’t know whether that’s true.

Mr. SEIGLER: Right, we’ll see but, you know, a lot of people are talking.

Mr. GILLMOR: But that doesn’t really lend any credence one way or the other to the notion that we’ve reached some sort of stability and that people are starting to question, I mean, Caroline’s article suggested that Shawn Parker, I believe is his name, one of the experts on the panel was Robert, said something to the effect that he was bored by all things social media. And she took that as being an indication that we were in a moment in time where modernization was going to become king and that there was little if any value to these, you know, yet another social community. Do you agree with that?

Mr. SIEGLER: Hmm, maybe, I mean, kind of, I guess in a way, I think, you know, if people see Facebook now making money and they kind of all focus just solely on that, you know, we might see a little decline in terms of overall crazy innovation that’s going on, but, I think in general, I don’t think that that will really happen. I mean, you know, they’re still – I think Dick Costolo said it well on, you know, also at TechCrunch50 when, I think it was Jason or someone asked him, so why join Twitter, you know, you sold the company to Google, you obviously have plenty of money, you don’t need to do anything. But he saw it, you know, he said something along the lines of that he sees it as one of those companies that comes along every once in a while that can possibly change things. So clearly, you know, he’s been sold on that idea just for Twitter alone, so that said something, I think.

Mr. GILLMORE: Kevin Marks, what do you think?

Mr. MARKS: I think we’re getting to the point now where this stuff is ready to use. We’ve been working to make social bargain (unintelligible) the web and that’s happening. And so now that’s a tacit part of the side, it’s another thing in itself. So, what I saw at TechCrunch50 was a lot of companies that were taking that pervasiveness sociality as an assumption and then building new things on top of that. And I’m seeing more and more of that as we people do things on top of Twitter, on top of Facebook, on top of (unintelligible), on top of all these ways of connecting to the stuff that’s already there. Robin is saying yes, we’re going to make this another destination site, they say, we’re going to take this stuff you got and do something interesting with it.

Mr. GILLMOR: Seth Goldstein.

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yes, Steve.

Mr. GILLMOR: You’re “Mr. Modernization” or you will be. I mean, I don’t personally think that this is – that there is anything different going on here at all. I think that this is just a recognition that some people have figured out how to be able to do something that looks relatively stable more than once. But I think that the pace of innovation is actually going to accelerate rather rapidly right now. What do you think?

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: I agree. Let me start – I have a friend who used to work for me named Jon Steinberg who built something called social gray(ph) that aggregates Foursquare data to show what’s trending and Foursquare is of course built in part on the iPhone and on top of Twitter. So, I think you’re going to see derivatives of derivatives. You’ll see complex API instruments the same way we’ve seen complex financial instruments the last couple of years in Wall Street. I think there’s going to be five years of innovation before all comes crashing down and breaks all the APIs.

Mr. GILLMOR: Oh, that’s very optimistic. What do you mean by crashing down? You’re making an analogy to tarp and all of the (unintelligible).

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: No. I’m making this up as I go. I’ve never thought of this big of idea before.

Mr. GILLMOR: Join the club.

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: However, if you think about, you know, building services on top of the APIs that are building services on top of other APIs, it’s a form of leverage, it’s a form of derivatives on top of, you know, complex web service instruments and I think they will continue to be built on top of each other and at some point on the line there will be some crash. I don’t know if it will be a technology crash or a financial crash associated with it, but I think we have five or seven years of relentless and reckless innovation on top of all these open APIs.

Mr. GILLMOR: Ok, well, I accept the second part of the premise but not the first. I mean, everybody has been calling – remember how the – we were going to run out of bandwidth for the Internet, I think about 10 years ago? Kevin wasn’t that – wasn’t there a great stress around IPv6 and all that kind of stuff?

Mr. MARKS: (unintelligible) the thing on. I mean, we’re not running out of bandwidth, they’re running out of IP addresses. That’s the challenge that’s still there and it’s the, you know, it’s the Y2K-like problem that we still got and we’ve got to deal with.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, but the Y2K problem turn out to be bullshit too, so?

Mr. MARKS: Well, because we’ve fixed it in time, you know, a bunch of things broke.

Mr. GILLMOR: Ok, so how’s that IPv6 thing going?

Mr. MARKS: It’s getting there. You know, people working on it. Most of the mail (unintelligible) can now support it, people – the routers(ph) are starting to support it. But it’s a propagation thing until everyone’s on it we’re going to need to keep supporting both, IPv4 and IPv6. But what it should mean is that we can then go back to our proper end-to-end network rather than network of not so connected together that don’t quite connect every protocol.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, what I really think this is going to drive this and many of the adoption of so-called open standards is going to be market force coming to bare on more than one company. In other words, the competition between two larger companies essentially driving a standard out of the rubble of the interaction between the two. MG, what’s your thought about – is Facebook, is it really Facebook versus Twitter or is there some larger struggle underway right now?

Mr. SIEGLER: I mean, I think, that they are doing, you know, the two most interesting things in the states right now on a large scale that a lot of people are seeing but, you know, certainly Kevin will know what Google is doing and things like that.

Mr. GILLMOR: No, he used to but they cut him off since he left.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right, he is. Obviously.

Mr. MARKS: I see somebody.

Mr. SIEGLER: (Laughing) but yeah, I mean, the two of them are really kind of going at it, that looks right now and on a larger scale than most people are watching. But there a lot of other interesting companies like, you know, we brought up Foursquare and there are some other ones doing some interesting things.

Mr. GILLMOR: What do Foursquare do?

Mr. SIEGLER: Solely, you know, they’re basically location based – it’s more or less a game, you know, you play, you kind of check in places and you can get there…

Mr. GILLMOR: Oh, this is what the mayor of something is about?

Mr. SIEGLER: Right, exactly. It’s the thing you’re always asking me about. Why am I the mayor of so and so.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, I think I’m going to continue to ignore this one.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Mr. GILLMOR: What else besides Foursquare?

Mr. SIEGLER: Well, I mean, I think that something that it touches upon something that’s kind of something that hasn’t really been touched upon that much yet, which is location which all these services are soon, you know, going to be offering more and more of. Facebook hasn’t really gotten into it at all. They did a small announcement the other day with Nokia to do something for it but, you know, eventually, they’re certainly going to roll out their own location stuff. And now Twitter has got the Geolocation API. There’s a lot of potentially cool things that can happen in the space still that’s not tapped at all with that.

Mr. GILLMOR: Jump in any time gentlemen.

Mr. MARKS: Well, I was – as usual, you’re picking the two companies that the Valley(ph) is talking about ignoring the rest of the world. So I can put my (unintelligible) half back on and say actually there’s lots of sites out there that have moved into this idea of delegating the ability to other sites. So as you can, you know, you can log in now with Facebook, you can log in now with Twitter and we’re seeing sites that do that. You can do the same thing with Google, with MySpace, with Hi5, with a whole bunch of other sites but the difference is that those ones are all using a common protocol. So, what I think we’re seeing is that with these things are starting to converge more and the assumption that I have to create a new account to every site is starting to go away. There was a good post about it this morning by Michael Mahamoff (ph) about different log-in models. And the log-in model – we’re moving away from the I-create-an-account-on-every-site and towards the I-can-log-in-with-an-existing-account and bring some of the value of that account has and be (unintelligible) to it and that’s new. That’s by design, that’s because we’re working hard towards that and a bunch of cross-company ways now. And if you looked at, you know, the tornado stuff we talked about last week, it has a lot of that stuff built in because it was what they were using in FriendFeed. The way you can log in to FriendFeed with different accounts and it brings the friends in the profile information from that then they put into the framework and at the source which I thought was very smart of them. Which means that there is now a more general way to do that and I expect that’s going to extend overtime and the idea of having to create a new account will go away because people will realize actually this is much nicer. I can just use the stuff I already got. I don’t have to get through that recreation thing all the time.

Mr. GILLMOR: So then, Robert, are you there back?

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah, I am back.

Mr. GILLMOR: Jump in any time. It seems like the, you know, I hesitate to call it a battle, but the most important thing that companies are looking for in terms of establishing leverage in this space is around identity to your point, Kevin.

Mr. MARKS: Well, that’s one way of looking at it. I think that – the thing is that, sorry it’s not able to delegate the (unintelligible). They don’t have to do that. They can draw on the ones that already exist.

Mr. GILLMOR: So before, there’s still – there has to be a, you know, some sort of an on ramp, you know, once you have somebody – MG, you need to pull your mike a little bit away from your face, it’s just rattling a little bit. Once you’ve established a ubiquitous log on that every ends up using, you’re kind of in a situation where you might one want to leverage it.

Mr. MARKS: Well, the point is to establish a standard figure for log on so that it’s not bound to any particular organization. Now that’s the point of, you know, an idea now often and put all the contacts and the stuff we’ve been building is that it’s not bound to one particular provider. It’s a web-like protocol that you can log in and use the same stuff whoever is providing it. So that could be, you know, it could be provided by a large organization. It could be something you host yourself. But the point of these, of coming with common protocols is that you can scale from – two things, one is you can scale from – to (unintelligible) number of providers, and the other is that you can connect with people without actually having to have a business arrangement with them, without, you know, without even knowing about their existence often. Once you got a common protocol for logging in, you can log in to – people can log in to you with accounts you never heard of and that’s a very valuable thing.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I keep hearing about people decrying or talking about the death of open ID, for example. Now, I don’t know what that means but I do know that it represents the sentiment that these kinds of open standards are harder than they look.

Mr. MARKS: Well, I think, they’re getting easier than they look, that’s the point. You’re using it without realizing you’re using it now. When you log in…

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I think that goes back to the old argument about market force, which is that when you have something that captures the imagination of people, you know, be at a game or whatever, that it starts to have a certain amount of ubiquity at that point people come in the standards arena and basically roll it together with other similar market force standards. And then you’ve got something as opposed to trying to create it at heart from the beginning which I think, history doesn’t really show a whole lot of adoption to that kind of thing.

Mr MARKS: No question (unintelligible) that thing. What happens is that people try things out and then we iterate them and can try and converse them a (unintelligible) on that way.

Mr. GILLMOR: Uh huh.

Mr. MARKS: But, you know, but what I’m saying about OpenID being invisible is that, when you log into FriendFeed with your Google account, it’s using OpenID. You just don’t know it’s using OpenID because the user experiences now seems that it’s not obviously using OpenID. And that’s, you know, that’s the piece though that they were moving towards, where the experience is very, very smooth. Now, the drawback is that to make it that smooth, they didn’t give an option to log in with another OpenID account, which I think is a shame. But, that’s something I expect to see change every time where it becomes easier to put your account in and it works out the right thing to do. That’s the (unintelligible) web thing, finger protocol but being discussed and we’ve talked about that one before. The idea of that is that you can put in an email-like identifier and then its approach we’re discovering other services from that in the same way you can do with an OpenID. You know, the value of an OpenID was that you get your all from it which is a place you can then go to get further API endpoints and so on. So, the point of web thing, we select you to do the same thing with an email-like address. So, an email address or what you call a (unintelligible) address or the @ name at domain structure addresses where the (unintelligible) can let you take that and look up endpoints to get further API access there. So, you can do the contents, contacts access, profile access, and things like that you can do with the (unintelligible). So that, is one of the building blocks to make this stuff more natural and much less intrusive part of this interface. You don’t actually have to know what protocol you are using. You just type in the identifier that you recognize and in the background, the log in can work out the right thing to do and present you with the, you know, approval page that say Okay, you used the goggling mail address, well, use your goggle account to populate this. You don’t have to type in the whole bunch of stuff that you’ve already typed in somewhere else.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, unfortunately, Kevin, I like to have you explain or unpack complex stuff. But, there’s nobody here who can explain what you just said. So, Seth, what’s your take on where we’re going to go in terms of these standards?

Mr. GOLOSTEIN: I agree with Kevin. And I think is that it seems like a showdown between using your Twitter ID and using your Facebook ID for, you know, remote delegation of your identity. And, I know last night, yesterday, the day before I changed my Facebook – I want to change my Facebook password and changed the password and I was concerned because I knew – I didn’t know how that would trickle across the web in terms of all the other services and my iPhone that were accessing and Facebook Connect and they were accessing my Facebook stream via that password. And fortunately I think it’s pretty seamless behind the scenes. But I think there’s a growing sense that, you know, our single password or single log in is rippling through all these different web services that we’re utilizing.

Mr. GILLMOR: Robert, you’re back now, right?

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. Sorry about that.

Mr. GILLMOR: It’s all right. Have you been able to follow along or you as loss as I am?

Mr. SCOBLE: I’m also lost because, yeah, I’m driving over the hill and my phone call got kicked off by the TV.

Mr. GILLMOR: So, MG, what do you think is going to be the next big story that you’ll be covering? What are you looking for right now?

Mr. SEIGLER: Right now, I’m trying to wine down from TechCrunch50s.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, we’re all on the valley of the end of TechCrunch50 but we’re going to have a bunch of rather significant conferences over the next month and a half or so. And, it seems like things are sort of boiling down into what Kevin’s talking about at a technical level is going to also be manifested at a more political level.

Mr. SCOBLE: And commercial level.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, well, I see commercial and political as being the same thing. But, agreed. So, you’re disagreeing with that. Go ahead.

Mr. SCOBLE: I don’t know that much about politics but I think I know more about commercial reality and what I’m seeing on the commercial side is in the valley we talked about – we use to talked about MySpace and now it’s primarily, you know, Twitter – we’ve been talking about Facebook for years. To a certain extent, Twitter has now taken a lot of the air out of MySpace. It was Twitter and Facebook – but there’s all sorts of other media out there that had a lot of vested interests, commercially and politically. And, they’re trying to figure how to become more social both on the customer side and on the advertising side. And I think it’s going to be faced with as it relays to Facebook Connect, do they implement Facebook Connect one of the data politics of that as it relates to their business case? I think Google has a chance to become everybody’s friend, and so far as Google can be seen as more open and available as a platform than Facebook. And so, I think Google will be waiting and the wings for all these media companies to provide some semblance of social features and so far as the media companies might be reluctant to adapt Facebook Connect.

Mr. GILLMOR: MG, do you agree that Google is waiting and it’s going to pounce or like me, do you agree that that Google seems to have a difficult time winding social graph and other types of social energy into their current services?

Mr. SIEGLER: Yeah, I mean. I totally agree with that. I’ve said that a lot of times. I think that’s it’s been pretty clunky how Google has been laying the social lair over all these different things right now. They could have been doing a lot of things earlier certainly with all their different applications. And actually, one of the companies that launched and made the – was in the DemoPit and then won the DemoPit competition at TechCrunch50 was this is a social walk thing. Which is pretty interesting because it – it basically almost works like a FriendFeed type layer over Google Apps, which is – and the work seems to work very well. I know that they’re working pretty close they said with people at Google on it. So, it’s something like that, you know, these third party companies they just came along and did this. And it looks like a much better social implementation than a lot of things that you see right now within many of the Google Apps themselves, because they’re all kind all spread over the place and, you know, there’s nothing really to tie all these different things in and…

Mr. SCOBLE: I agree with that. I want to build on that, which is I think that Google is not waiting in the wings with these social solutions because I do think that they’ve been clunky. I don’t think they have the social graph DNA that Facebook or Twitter has. What I think Google can do is enable third parties to legitimately innovate social solutions on top of Google in a way that Facebook has demonstrated time and time again that they’re not willing to do. Facebook is not really supporting third party applications and third party networks to do the kind of innovation on top of Facebook that they might have been a couple of years ago. It feels like Facebook is trying to close off to third party innovations because they want to do it themselves for better or for worse. And Google, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, Google is now I think going to cozy up to innovative start ups and allow them to do things socially on top of Google, but they can’t do social on top of Facebook.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I find it interesting that you think about Google what I think about Facebook. I actually disagree with you. I mean, historically, Facebook is at a very difficult time in, you know, trying to essay the difference between a closed motive gate(ph) of community and their increasingly large numbers of users. But, I think that they’re – I think, you know, frankly I think the purchase or the merging with FriendFeed team adds significant leverage in terms of dealing with their so-called everyone’s status which I think that they’re going to build out in a very competitive, you know, model as compared to Twitter, where I think that Google, although, they’ve certainly made some strides in terms of opening up Google reader in fact I know, MG, agrees with me to some extent about the success with which they have added social tools to Google reader. They’ve certainly made a large effort over the past few months. I did notice, for example, that in one of my rare visits to Google reader a couple of days ago, I noticed that they are actively now telling me about people that are making available their shared feeds. Kevin Marks, you and I went through a significant amount of back and forth…

Mr. MARKS: Back and forth, yes, a couple of years ago.

Mr. GILLMOR: Back and forth about this. And, I guess that what we’re seeing now is that Google has decided that enough time has passed with the notion that undiscoverable URL, which is what it was originally has now sufficiently been pushed out into the mainstream. That they can afford to spam everybody with, you know, access to share feeds even though they might not be intended for that.

Mr. MARKS: Well, (unintelligible) we had the conversation about how many different sharing and what’s the options there are in Reader(ph) now. It’s getting a bit out of hand. But, there are two things going on there. One is you can see the shared stuff from the people that you already have a friend relationship and start Google with. The other is that because there’s Google profiles who can add URLs, it will discover the feeds from those URLs and the profile and offer you those. That was the other thing they added. So, yeah, they’re starting to pull the pieces together in some of the ways that FriendFeed does by the gathering that the multiple feeds that belong to a person and offering you those as something to read. So, you know, the nice thing is that again, it’s being built on mostly a set of open standards for how to discover those, how to find them, and the shared stuff is going out more publicly. And, yeah, the original friend model that was there two years ago was a (unintelligible) and didn’t work very well. Whereas now, the friend model I’ve got makes a lot more sense and it’s easier to manage and so on.

MR. GILLMOR: They may made more sense but it’s – go ahead, Robert.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah, the friend model in Google Reader just isn’t that useful. You know, first of all, if you get more than a few hundred friends, the whole thing slows way down. People are wondering why Twitter is getting all these adoption and all these hype. You can let it go around and use symmetrically(ph), you follow thousands of people without getting the following system from slowing down. And Google Reader is not there, it’s horrid. Also, I can’t immigrate my following with other systems and that’s something I keep holding out hope that the systems will integrate together. I’m now playing with Frenzy, and Frenzy is bringing me my Facebook, my Twitter, and my Gmail in together. But still, there’s no way to aggregate or put together all of Kevin Marks’ items and let me curate Kevin Marks himself and share that back out. Share why Kevin Marks, why what Kevin Marks set on Twitter this morning was really important. I’m still waiting for a really killer system.

Mr. GILLMOR: So, you’re starting to talk about…

Mr. MARKS: But they should be. I mean, you know, in that case, they should be able to connect the different ones together because they’re all bounce together for me particularly for the Google profile in the public way. So, they should be able to discover that. They may just have built that piece of it yet because they built the three separately. (Unintelligible) I like to look of it, I like the demo, I have no chance to play with it yet. But if, you know, if you think how the others, how friendly it binds multiple IDs together, it works reasonably well.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. They (unintelligible) in on it. I love the Google profile, right? And it auto finds where, you know, it (unintelligible) all my accounts or a lot of my accounts all over the place. But it’s just the following. I want to follow Kevin Marks in Google Reader. It’s not very nice to find people. It’s not nice to group them. Getting in there and there’s no real good system for managing followers. It drives me nuts. Foursquare is another one. You know, I have 500 friends waiting on Foursquare to be added, and if you click add, it takes something like five seconds to visit one, it has to refresh the page, it’s not using (unintelligible). I can’t add everybody which is really what I want to. (Unintelligible). And then I can’t put them into groups. I can’t say this group is San Francisco group and this group is my Boulder Colorado group. How lame is that? Just the freaking location base system built for 2010 and it has the worst content measurement system I’ve ever seen.

Mr. MARKS: But I think, well, I can defend them a little. With FourSquare, what they do is they let you assign your own home city. So you can’t tell it that they’re San Francisco people, it will put them in the San Francisco bucket and then when they get – travel to Boulder, they put themselves in the Boulder bucket. So you don’t get to control that.

Mr. SCOBLE: I know, but then, you know, that’s just an example of – they really haven’t thought through. These new systems coming online haven’t thought through how can we manage, make it easier to manage friend groups.

Mr. MARKS: No, I thinks that’s the next frontier, yeah.

Mr. SCOBLE: I think that it’s stupid. You know, I …

Mr. MARKS: If you give me…

Mr. SCOBLE: You know, have informed anything from Twitter, why don’t they let me import all my friends from Twitter? Forget making me add another 500 people to another freaking social media piece of crap.

Mr. MARKS: Right, that’s exactly what I was saying. I mean, that was the – the – what was that thing today, Twitter times, did you see that? That was …

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. MARKS: That was quite a nice thing that says, Ok, well, where we do we, Twitter followers and the links they do and give you a sort of personal tech name of it, or here’s the popular links that you’re – people you’re following to and tune in does something very similar. They’re able to do that because they can get out these sets and they work for people like us who follow a lot of people because we generate in all those signal for them. I think the challenge for – you know, you and I are in a place where we’re following too many people and we suddenly need these tools. Most people haven’t got that far yet and so the priority for these groups is, let’s get the people on board first then let’s build the management stuff. But I do think that’s going to be the next (unintelligible)…

Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t agree with the idea that…

Mr. SCOBLE: That’s also maybe…

Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t agree, yeah, I’ll let you get in a second, hang on. I don’t agree with the idea that this is all about, you know, early adapters and people who got too many things to follow. This is a mainstream issue that is servicing first …

Mr. MARKS: No, wait, wait.

Mr. GILLMOR: That is servicing first in, you know, in Scoble and Mark’s land but it’s going to rapidly …

Mr. MARKS: No, that’s absolutely …

Mr. GILLMOR: It’s going to rapidly become common place.

Mr. SCOBLE: It is, it is…

Mr. MARKS: The think is, at the moment, what you do is you segment your friends by having them in different sites because that was the model we had and then you have to build separate groups in different places …

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, I don’t agree with that. I mean, to me, I don’t use …

Mr. MARKS: Expect to hold. That’s, that’s…

Mr. GILLMOR: I don’t use Twit deck, I don’t use a lot of these services that attempt manage by grouping because at the end of the day it becomes more complicated and time consuming to create the groups and then curate them than it does to just use serendipity and much more social graphic types of equations. Seth, you want to say something.

Mr. SCOBLE: It’s, it’s…

Mr. GILLMOR: Hang on a sec, Robert.

Mr. SCOBLE: All right.

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: About, about FourSquare. I’m very deliberate about who I allow to know where I am physically, and that’s the case with Google Latitude, and that’s the case with FourSquare and I appreciate that I have to create a new social graph within FourSquare to be very intentional about these different set of people, friends, colleagues, relatives, et cetera in terms of who I am allowing to see where I am and that I can – you know, at different levels of permission in terms of just sharing that with my FourSquare friends and then sharing that more broadly with Twitter followers. Whereas on Facebook, you know, I have thousands of friends and I know that whatever I put on Facebook, they’re going to see. I actually appreciate this sort of extra layer of introspection and to your earlier point, Steve, I mean, we are moving into this gesture economy and to this gesture stream and the geolocation of us is of fundamental gesture. I mean, that is becoming literally physical. You know, where am I, what am I doing, sharing that and then within that.

Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead, Robert.

Mr. SCOBLE: I totally disagree. First of all, the whole privacy thing …

Mr. GILLMOR: With what?

Mr. SCOBLE: Yes, about the – let’s focus on location-based privacy for just a second.

Mr. GILLMOR: OK..

Mr .SCOBLE: Everybody comes at these lat – the Google Latitude and the FourSquare is that way and it’s lame. The best thing I’ve ever done was share my location with everybody. I get more friends that way, more people are coming into my life that way. And when I’m in San Francisco, people call me up and say, hey, you’re nearby want to have a, you know, want to have a sandwich and stuff like that. And I’ve never had any bad trouble. First of all, let’s assume that you’re correct that you really need to focus on where you’re going to share your location, which is probably true for a lot of people. Why can’t I just bring in all my Facebook friends and then click on the ones I don’t one to share with or I do want to share with and say add those to FourSquare and make it easy. Right now, you know, going through, if you have 500 people asking to get your attention on FourSquare and you will have 500 people getting your attention because there’s a freaking game and a fun game, it’s an addictive game. Everybody is going to want to play this game and everybody is going to want to add everybody else on the social graph and now you’re going to end up just like me with 500 people asking to get your attention. And right now you have to click add, and then you have to wait five seconds for your freaking page to reload because the jerks over there were too lazy to do Ajax like Doppler does. Doppler doesn’t know if…

Mr. GILLMOR: You know, Robert, I really think that this is a problem that you have and that many of us don’t.

Mr. SCOBLE: So everybody says that. Everybody says that, oh, I remember having this freaking thing conversation on IPQ(ph). Nobody will have a thousand friends and then everybody have a thousand friends. Nobody would have a thousand followers on Twitter. I remember having that conversation, too and now, I asked the guardians at TechCrunch50 the other day, how many people have a thousand followers, a lot of hands went up. This is going to be a problem…

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, that’s different, Robert. It’s different to have a thousand viewers or followers and to have a thousand followers who know that you are standing 10 feet away from them. Location-based social media is the special case. It certainly going to have some value and it’s fun as a game but it …

Mr. SCOBLE: Because it’s a game, just because this is a game, the FourSquare is a game, you are going to want to share your location with large numbers of people. And yeah, there will be privacy cries and there will be, you know, somebody you just …

Mr. MARKS: Pretending that’s true at all Robert, I think …

Mr. SCOBLE: Doctors would want that…

Mr. GILLMOR: Go ahead, Kevin.

Mr. MARKS: And it’s true too. I think, you know, you’ve chose into live in public and I have to some extent as well, but I know, lots of people who’ve have very different views. One of my …

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. I’m not saying that you just (unintelligible)…

Mr. MARKS: One of my female friends said, I’m not going to let anyone know where I am on a FourSquare unless that’s somebody who would hold my hair while I’m vomiting, that was the test to say, you know, that’s the test for personalness that she was using there. People have different points on that continuum and there is a certain (unintelligible) when fear of people stalking them.

Mr. SCOBLE: Kevin, you don’t need seven billion people to have a lot of freaking people on your freaking social graph. There’s a lot of people who are going to be wanting to play this game and sharing their location with each other. And yes, maybe it’s only five percent of the population. Five percent of seven billion people is a lot freaking people on your social graph who want – you need to manage. And the fact that these companies take the late low road, lazy road on engineering because they don’t have enough time to build it properly, it’s just bullshit.

Mr. MARKS: Well, give them some, Robert. They just got some funding. They can probably afford to hire more engineers than just one now.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah, OK, you know what, that flew three years ago Twitter was just getting going and nobody understood that these systems would be popular. It doesn’t buy with me anymore.

Mr. MARKS: Well, probably the point, there’s two thing there, one is, FourSquare did only just get funding. It was two guys and on credit cards until a couple of weeks ago and they’ve got like a long way …

Mr. SCOBLE: They built dodgeball. Why did dodgeball fail? It failed because of bullshit like this. They don’t think it’s real and then they get popular and they go, ooh, our skill ability problems are there. Fucking, if you’re going to put up a service out in public, build it right first.

Mr. MARKS: Yeah, I’ve been there, done that and it’s easier to say than to do. Part of the thing is, part of the value is it’s just (unintelligible). You can delegate these.

Mr .SCOBLE: I know but now they’re (unintelligible) the ability problems and the service is falling down and now they got planning – well see if they fix their problems. It’s going to turn in to the next Twitter where at Twitter is still down all everyday, you know, because they never got on top of their skill ability problems up front.

Mr. MARKS: No, I think Twitter has caught up now but, yeah, they don’t want to be go where friends today.

Mr SCOBLE: Of every freaking day, man. Twitter everyday, I mean, giving that thing 500 times a day. Everyday I had problems on Twitter. It is still having skill ability problems.

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, I think we’re rolling a bunch of different issues up into one social mess. Seth, what do you think is, you know, the resolution of this kind of conflict between too much and too little in terms of, you know, privacy versus public – and for those who probably can’t hear us, I believe that the U-stream is down or we’re down to U-stream so, we’re recording, so, we’ll finish the show up and then we’ll release it on YouTube. Do you understand my question, Seth?

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: No.

Mr. GILLMOR: We’ve got this notion of these capabilities being under implemented and unreliable versus this incredible public utility of these technologies and general move toward adapting and for virtually every input that becomes meaningful to us from an economic and also personal perspective. It just seems like we’re always going to have Robert as the sort of every man basically saying, how come this thing doesn’t work because it’s so absolutely crucial to what I – to my existence.

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, so I, I hear that. I don’t think there’s necessarily a question here. I think that Robert brings up the right point and I think Robert would be a great investor and board member to one, you know, popular and increasingly popular web service start-ups about the need early on to really think about these scaler shoes and think about managing multiple groups and thinking about managing – you know, Robert was the one when we all had 50 Facebook friends. He was the one problematizing the case of having 5,000 Facebook friends and we appreciate him for that. I think on a deeper level and on a more basic level what is awesome right now is not only do people want to share information on Facebook, not only do they want to share information on Twitter but they now want to share the informations on fourth square and that there is a positive feedback where people want to, you know, as you would say, Steve, kind of up drift or their gestures into the cloud and that is going to unlock a ton of innovation around this space and I think from a privacy – in politics’ perspective, we are in a very different place than to Twitter in where we were two years ago and these advances in – in data sharing and in attention syndication are not getting constrained and hem strung by knee jerk responses from the mass market PR and the mainstream PR.

Mr. GILLMOR: M.G, what do you think?

Mr. SIEGLER: Yeah, I mean, I think that we’re about to – to get too big witness test for all these location stuff obviously. So when the Twitter geo location API goes live, it’s going to be a first big one. The second big one, you know, bigger would be with Facebook rules out whatever they’re going to do with locations. Because that’s going to be 300 million people who all of a sudden have these shoved in their face. Now obviously, I mean, I have to think that they’re going to do this, you know, the right way and obviously make it opt in. I mean, there’s no way that they could just turn that on for everyone and then everyone knows where you are if you have the iPhone ap or whatnot. But, yeah, you know, Robert is talking about that he wants all these, all these networks put together and you know, you just easily port your friends over from Twitter into FourSquare automatically and stuff and certainly, some people like that but the majority of people that I talked to are right now using FourSquare the same way that Seth was talking about very differently from the way that these Twitter in terms of their social graph – they just, they will only accept people who they, you know, do not mind knowing where they are and like Kevin was talking about and they’re not – you know, like I’ve a huge list of people who I’m, I’m just not accepting. It’s not because I don’t necessarily think that they’re going to be stalking me or whatever. It’s just, it’s a question of do I really want to know where they are all the time and do I want them knowing where I am all the time. But when, you know, when Twitter geo location rules out and then all of your twits are tagged with where you actually are, that’s going to be a really interesting test for all these stuff.

Mr. GILLMOR: On the other hand, I think Robert does have a good instinct about this stuff. Things that seem to be unlikely to have a utility when they get, you know, to mass Scoble type scale often turn out to be just the opposite. They turn out to be very useful. You know, the whole…

Mr. SIEGLER: Sure.

Mr. GILLMOR: The whole argument about the track and you know, the speed of real time for example, most people pitching whole that as being something that only a small number of technologists were interested in.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right.

Mr. GILLMOR: When feed switched over that model, there was a hue and outcry about it.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right.

Mr. GILLMOR: Followed by rapid…

Mr. SIEGLER: Yeah, not everyone loved it.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah, exactly.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right.

Mr. GILLMOR: And you know, they use these numbers…

Mr. SIEGLER: And they think it’s going to be…

Mr. GILLMOR: They use these numbers as much.

Mr. SIEGLER: It’s going to be the same thing (unintelligible) location I think. I mean, it’s just – it’s going to take a long time for location because like – unlike real time, real time, you know, when it first ruled out, a lot of us thought it was really cool but we also saw that people would probably get annoyed with it because there’s just so much information coming in. But a lot of us, you know, recognize it. Eventually everyone would love it and you know…

Mr. GILLMOR: Well the reality is that there is so much information coming in and we just have…

Mr. SIEGLER: Right, right.

Mr. GILLMOR: Without any way of dealing with it yet.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right. Why would you want to slow it down when you can get it in, you know…

Mr. GILLMOR: Well, what – put it the other way. How do you fix it? How do you make it useable? I mean, that – you know, I think Google rater is a great – I think, Google rater is a great product. It, it blew out the market frankly. And the problem is is that it’s so good at what it does that it makes it unusable for me. There’s too much.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah. Steve, the thing that we’re forgetting is utility causes human to change their behavior and their attitude. And not, I’m now sharing openly that I have a kidney disease. Ten years ago, I probably wouldn’t have done that. Right? Why do I share that? And why am I going to open up my medical records and share that on some system? Because the goodness you get back, the sharing of information with doctors around the world and with people who have that disease and so on and so forth, is far greater than the incursion on my privacy that I’m perceived – perceiving, right? And same thing with location. I’m already using (unintelligible) and to find things, find businesses near me and telling, yup, I’m here in (unintelligible) bay and then shares me hoe, there’s a peeps(ph) copy, you know, half a mile away. That utility is going to cost people to change their behavior and change their attitude, you know, toward – you think. Now will it take a year or will it take five years or ten years, I don’t know. But over time people are going to find that when they share their location with other people, a lot of goodness comes back to them and therefore, they’re going to buy into these systems.

Mr. SIEGLER: Right. But what is – we need to, we need to build tools in a (unintelligible) system AP, we’re comfortable with that. They select these share in a way that doesn’t involve lots of administration and messing around.

Mr. GILLMOR: But…

Mr. SIEGLER: So we need to build…

Mr. SCOBLE: Absolutely.

Mr. SIEGLER: Well the Harry Potter analogy. We need to not be build in a Marauders map. We need to be building the Weasley’s clock that says, you know, Kevin’s at home, work, Kevin’s at home whatever to a set of – the family rather the thing you conspire wherever on the world is which is the, the Marauders map.

Mr. SCOBLE: Right.

Mr. SIEGLER: And so it’s the intersection administration that works on the location stuff.

Mr. SCOBLE: Somebody will…

Mr. SIEGLER: And so there’s a sort of mentioned walk…

Mr. SCOBLE: Somebody will discover that…

Mr. GILLMOR: What?

Mr. SIEGLER: One second.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah, somebody will discover that, that’s right. There’s a company called Glimpse for instance that does exactly what the latitude does in terms of sharing your information with everybody. But it puts a little time clock on it. And so, if I’m heading towards your house and I want you to see my location, I’ll just share it on Glimpse and say, share it for only 30 minutes and that way…

Mr. SIEGLER: But it’s still going to manage that manually.

Mr. SCOBLE: The clock will see me in equal time.

Mr. SIEGLER: So my friend…

Mr. SCOBLE: What’s that?

Mr. SIEGLER: You still would have managed it manually which is not right. My friend Jessie who – he’s building (unintelligible) which is a calendar thing. But draws your calendar and helps you find events – he was, I was telling him about this. He said, well what you want is to know – if you know the calendar and who you are meeting, you would share your location with people with – within an hour of the meeting so they can if you’re there yet and how close you’re getting. And I thought, yeah, that would give – that would actually make a lot of sense. That will be a very natural default thing to do and I said, Seth, we’ll find more of these over time which is – but part of it is the intersection of the social and the local. So it’s…

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. SIEGLER: There’s a set of people that I’m happy to share very detailed location data with. There’s a set of people that I don’t want them to know where I am at all. And then there’s the people in general and I don’t – I’ve no reason there. And there’s bit of a blind spot in the geo-community in this and this is something I’ve noticed – been noticing for years which is that they’re so focused on geo points, they don’t think about fuzziness. So actually share – one of the things that forced with us is that you share physical addresses and you label the dresses. So the location is as specific as the addresses. So I’ve seen people constructing force where locations that are non-specific, that are – that don’t actually have a good geo point to them. So they can check into their house and their apartment without the whole world knowing where they are but their friends who know it’s their apartment say, all right, Fred’s – at Fred’s house tonight. Okay, that’s good to know. So I think we – that’s one of the things, the issues I have with, with Ryan and the geo staff in Twitter is that he hasn’t got the fuzziness premature at the moment. That it’s roughly proposed. It is a point whereas you do need some fuzziness to say, I’m in Palo Alto as opposed to, I’m at Fresh Yogurt in Palo Alto depending on who you’re talking to.

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. SIEGLER: Or depending on who you’re trying to broadcast it to. And also, there’s also a whole bunch of other new ones in this, you know. If I’m in Palo Alto, well that’s not a big deal. It’s just down the street. If, you know, J.P. (unintelligible) is coming to Palo Alto from London, it’s a big deal and people, you know, will come down from San Francisco to have dinner with him. So there’s a difference between…

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. SIEGLER: The importance of the information based on a whole bunch of other context. There’s a whole set of these context that we’re going to – you need to start making sense of and making intuitive in the same way that, you know, yeah, in the same way we have to thought rather – events in the stream. And having more of that and we’ll start making it more sensible but it’s also – there’s two sizes. One is the filtering from the last same information. But the other is the outbound filtering that sends out the, you know, the knowledge and the, you know, deciding who share with what and that’s going to take longer to work out. And we may start out…

Mr. GILLMOR: I think that – I think you’ve here on something that is fundamental to this. We’ve been talking a lot about filtering coming in and certainly, that’s going to be the sort of a Ground Zero of the next few months in the social space. But, you know, it effectively broadcasting, to micro communities is also going to become an exceptionally large focus for users and they’re going to look for tools that will allow them to do that and right now, I think, to what Robert is saying about the social, about the location space and what, you know, Seth is moving into in terms of his montization(ph) models are both examples of the immaturity of that space, which is why I think the…

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: What’s going on in terms of the assumption that we have reached some sort of mature point in terms of the social media, I think, we’re just barely touching down now and preparing to make these things actually useful, you know, I though that…

Mr. SCOBLE: Yeah:

Mr. GILLMOR: I thought Techron 50 was remarkable and it’s, you know, professional display and sort of funneling of the current visible stuff that’s going on. I thought, Threadsly(ph) or Treadsy(ph) or whatever it is that it’s called is a fantastic program. I have no idea why I’d want to use it. But I like what it does. It’s just seem attractive on some level.

Mr. SIEGLER: What I saw was transition. So, I saw a bunch of (unintelligible) that we’re doing this delegation. And again, I’ve been advising 140.com which is all about gathering the Twitter eco system and looking – we’re absolutely(ph) building that. So, I’ve seen lots and lots of those. And I was disappointed with a lot of the tech crunchings because they would obviously have been better aps if they got delegated login Robin, oh we’re going to create yet another place to share your photographs that belongs to this folks will say.

Mr. GILLMOR: That’s like saying that, because we don’t have an open standard, that that’s a problem. That’s not a problem.

Mr. SIEGLER: We do have open standards.

Mr. GILLMOR: We don’t.

Mr. SIEGLER: Yes, we do.

Mr. GILLMOR: We have people like you who are building them. You’re building them.

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: And they’re in their shipping.

Mr. GILLMOR: There’s a Walgreens down in the corner in Pacifica. He can’t go in there. It’s not open yet. I mean.

Mr. SCOBLE: Laughing:

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: These are open, they ship quite the size with biddings of uses, with over the bill and uses, you know. This isn’t…

Mr. GILLMOR: You’re sounding like you’re at Google again.

Mr. SCOBLE: Steve, Steve, I think the problem is when the problem for engineers taking dependency – and that’s. I have father and Mike’s office teams that check dependencies…

Mr. SIEGLER: That’s a good point.

Mr. SCOBLE: Like (unintelligible).

Mr. GILLMOR: I’d like to say, Robert. Could you speak up a little? Robert, speak up, I can’t hear you.

Mr. SCOBLE: What’s that? I’m just saying that engineers have an impulse of not taking dependencies on other things. Certainly not another commercial business. You know, that’s why, you know why the…

Mr. GILLMOR: What a shock.

Mr. SCOBLE: (unintelligible) don’t build in Facebook connect. Right? They should and as users, I want them too but I can sort of understand why they don’t do that. And I can sort of understand Kevin’s point too about FourSquare, why the engineers there say, you know, we’re going to build our own socialgraph and we’re going to force our users to do all the toll again because we want our separate pay and we don’t want any dependencies and we don’t want anybody else in control of our location base privacy call.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah. I understand Kevin’s point. What I’m saying is that…

Mr. SIEGLER: So there’s two points there. One, yes. You’re right about the dependencies. You have to have enough value in the thing you’re depending on to actually say every time Robin making a new work, sure. And that’s always an engineering trait. If it’s hard today – ahead of time and you have to have a fairly good case for that. The other half of that is you don’t want the dependency to ease bound to one company which is where the open standards come in. So, if you’re at work to the open standards, you can then depend on multiple companies that could provide that or individuals or whatever. Whereas,if you’re about, you are going to single supplier, then you got a problem.

Mr. GILLMOR: But you were commenting on was the disappointment about the fact that individual companies otherwise known as features by, you know, platform vendors, have, you know, individual ways of rowing on their own, you know, ingress and identity and so on and so forth. To me it’s like, if you go up to the 50,000 foot level, all that stuff goes away. It’s noise. You know, there will be a filtering mechanism that filters out and standardizes around these things and what you guys are building in the standard arena is a consensus that will be adapted at that point.

Mr. SIEGLER: Yes.

Mr. GILLMOR: But let’s not be disappointed in the fact that we’ve got, you know, 50 selling name companies that are doing some interesting stuff.

Mr. SIEGLER: Oh, no no. I wasn’t disappointed that they’re doing interesting stuff. I was disappointed for them in that, they were in interesting stuff that looked – that I suspected wouldn’t take off well unless they cover everything else. Now, part of that maybe is the artificiality of Tech Crunch where – TechCrunch 50 where you know, a lot of launchings rite before you go, they have to launch there. So they have to use this sort of slightly older stealth model for start up development (unintelligible).

Mr. GILLMOR: You mean, as opposed to the stealth model that everybody uses everywhere.

Mr. SIEGLER: No, as oppose to the (unintelligible) model where you launch something and then grow it gradually and then you know, (unintelligible).

Mr. GILLMOR: The industry model. I’ve heard of that but I’ve never seen it in a while.

Mr. SIEGLER: Well, I’ve seen a lot of it.

Mr. SCOBLE: Steve, the most interesting conversation that we’ve had here is the location one. I hope – I expect that we’re going to be talking about that a lot on the Gillmor Gang over the next few months. One thing that I haven’t heard too many people discuss about location is – I mean, let’s go back at the 50,000 people – Google studies the intent of people to search, right? I type in digital camera and they assume that I’m looking to buy a digital camera and they put ads next to that search. So, and by doing that, they unpack some value and they keep some money(ph). Location is going to do the same thing. I’m sitting in front of a pit. If I walked into a pit, that tells the world, I intend to buy some coffee, right? And then also tells the world, I’m a coffee fan. And I can build a whole set of assumptions about behavior I might exhibit elsewhere.

Mr. GILLMOR: Yeah.

Mr. SCOBLE: And then we’re going to see a – something like that around location. That’s where FourSquare is really interesting by the way because I check in various businesses and that tells the world a lot about what I am.

Mr. GILLMOR: But there’s – there are basis. This…

Mr. SIEGLER: They have that, they have these tips that you can create for the businesses. So, you actually get…. pay a recommendations when you check in there some way. It says, you know, try the veal or whatever. It says, the food here is good.

Mr. SCOBLE: Exactly.

Mr. GILLMOR: The main point of this, the main point of the location dynamic is that it’s about privacy and it’s about leveraging the outbound model. You have to have sophisticated tools to be able to tell, to be able to know and to have a legitimate contract with users to be able to broadcast to them in such a way that they are open to be in broadcaster. That’s what the gesture model describes. So, Seth…

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: Yeah.

Mr. GILLMOR: Since you and I were, you know, way ahead of a lot of this in terms of understanding where this was going to go, how do you see this as rolling out now in the real world because obviously, the attention trust may have been at the forefront of understanding that we were going to have to figure out how to be able to stand the flow of the fire hose or at least constrain it to some sort of inbound coherence. But… now, how do we turn it around and go outbound?

Mr. GOLDSTEIN: I mentioned before this one example, called social grate and all it does is take generic anonymous location data from four square and show which restaurants or which locations are a growing or declining in popularity overtime to kind of show key trends. Almost like a stock ticker and in a way, it’s the closest that I’ve seen to a realization of the gesture bank which is everybody in the four square ecosystem is acting in individually to share their information specifically to individuals. But there also, I guess, on some level intentionally or not, publishing it to this larger stream on information that can then be further analyzed and interpreted to provide media based on all these concurrent anonymous gesture streams and I think, there’s, you know, here we are four or five years later from when you really helped to first articulate this for me and it’s starting to happen. I think the privacy coordinates in the coordination around it is messy and is very ad hoc but I think, it’s a function of a broader cultural shift that is more comfortable sharing attention and gestures with a broader public audience.

Mr. GILLMOR: Oh, I love having the last word even if I didn’t say it. This is Steve Gillmor. This has been the Gillmor Gang. I want to thank everybody who showed up especially the people I’m looking at right now. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, MG. And Robert, wherever you are. Keep going. Bye-bye.