A friend of mine is working on a complicated publishing app; the data is
XML, perfectly appropriate when your objects are documents. She
told me they were thinking about automating some of the work by running XSLT
transformations out there in the client with
libxslt. I said “Well yeah, as long as
the client’s a PC not a tablet”. The category of “things you can do on a PC
but not a tablet” is interesting.

Anyone remember
AJAX? Now we just talk about Web apps, with towers
of JavaScript code (CoffeeScript for the
ultra-hip) built on an ever-growing library substrate (yes, there is
more than jQuery) making the browser look interesting.

It’s a good architecture! People like using browsers, JavaScript is growing up,
the Web Standards Project of yore has sort of won, and
REST keeps things nicely decoupled.

I dropped AJAX into that narrative for a reason. The ”X“ stood for
XML, which these days feels kind of heavyweight for use in Web apps,
unless you’re working with real actual documents. But when AJAX was a bright
shiny new idea, we didn’t care, because we had near-infinite power at our
disposal.

At the center of our world was a poor overtaxed Web server trying to take
care of a kazillion users’ requests. It was usually running in maxed-out mode,
while the computers it was serving were, in aggregate,
infinitely powerful, had hundreds of meg of lightly-used memory,
and typically ran with idle times averaging over 90%.

So all those other architectural advantages aside, the computer-resource
macroeconomics weren’t subtle; any piece of work you could offload from server
to client was a win.

It might still be. But there are clients and clients and clients.
Like I said at the top, you can’t run an XSLT transform on a phone.

In fact, there are lots of things you can’t do on a phone. I’m privileged
to work in close contact with platform engineers, and I’ve learned how
close mobile frameworks live to the edge of the possible. There’s no spare
memory and, since there’s no spare battery, there’s no spare CPU either.
I’m not just talking about Android, either.

This sort of sucks. There was a time when every client was a browser running
on a PC, and most PCs were in the big picture like most other PCs, and that’s
how the world was. But now, we’re in a position where client memory is very
nearly as scarce and precious as server memory. Which changes lots of things.

I’m not sure how this plays out. Right now, on Android or iOS, you can get
more out of that candybar in your pocket with a native app than with Web code.
But who knows how long that will last? We’ve got
Chrome on
Android now, and some of the phones they’re rolling out at MWC 2012 in
Barcelona constitute pretty big iron. On the other hand, you’d maybe like
your app to be available on a minimal developing-world phone too.

The one thing in the big picture that I don’t see changing any time soon is
the basic JSON-over-HTTP architecture of more or less every interesting
business app. That at least insulates the moving target running on the server
(NodeJS? Go?) from the moving target running on the client (Dart?
B2G?), and that has to
be a good thing.

Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support.
s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand)
Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

Terrier IR -- open source (Mozilla) text search engine, now with Hadoop support.
s3ql -- open source (GPLv3) Linux filesystem which stores its data on Google Storage, Amazon S3, or OpenStack. (via Adam Shand)
Esprima -- open source (BSD) fast Javascript parser in Javascript. (via Javascript Weekly)
Hogan.js -- open source (Apache) Javascript templating engine from Twitter. If it proves anywhere near as good as Bootstrap, it'll be heavily used.

Oh, Charlie. Charlie Kindel, that is. He used to work at Microsoft. He still has Microsoft in his blood as he tries to explain why Windows Phone 7 hasn’t taken off.

I thought about posting this over on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter, but I like the way MG Siegler is treating it. All the stupid stuff goes on the blog and all the important stuff goes on YouTube, Tumblr, or Google+. Heh.

MG mailed Charlie’s post back with a “way too late” headline and pointed out that apps do matter.

It’s worse than that. Sorry Charlie.

I had dozens of people here for several events this weekend. Phones came up in nearly every conversation. Not a single person brought up Windows Phone 7.

While watching TV I was reminded again of why: it’s all about apps. Yeah, Charlie, all that other stuff matters a bit. You know, what Carriers decide to push and all that. But only if the customers are willing to go along with the push.

See, I used to work retail and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t unload crappy products on consumers. They generally are smarter than that.

One thing I learned working the counter at several Silicon Valley consumer electronics stores is that there’s only one thing people really care about when it comes to buying things:

Not looking stupid.

Now, let’s look at the ads on TV right now. There’s all sorts of people saying to get their app, including the local TV news departments. Do they talk about Android? Yes, of course. iOS? Of course! Windows Phone 7? Hell no. RIM/Blackberry? I haven’t heard that in an app advertisement in, well, forever.

So, when a consumer goes into a carrier store to buy a new phone, what is going on in the back of her/his head?

Android=safe.
iOS/iPhone=safe.
Everything else=not safe.

Why? Because all you had to do was come to my Christmas parties to see why. Everything around you showed that having an Android or an iPhone was “safe.”

When I go around interviewing startups I hear over and over that they are staying away from anything that isn’t Android or iOS based.

That means that any product not based on iOS or Android isn’t “safe.”

End of discussion. Until RIM or Microsoft changes that belief among app developers in a demonstrable way Microsoft will continue to struggle.

And don’t tell me that Nokia is gonna be able to change this in the developing world. Anyone who is on Twitter now can watch this search:

https://twitter.com/#!/search/apps

Go ahead. Put that search into a good Twitter client. Every second or two a new Tweet gets made. Now watch how many of them talk about anything but iOS or Android devices: nearly none.

I watch this search every day on StreamBoard on my iPad.

It shows why Charlie is so wrong: apps do matter and matter big time and TODAY matter more than carriers. UPDATE: Charlie claims he didn’t say apps don’t matter. Just that they don’t matter for his discussion. I disagree. Here’s why: Carriers are no longer hungry for a competitor to iPhones the way they were back in 2009. So, the “lever” to the market will NOT be carriers. But Android and iOS DO have a “lever” called developers and apps.

That will not change in 2012, no matter how much Microsofties (or ex-Microsofties) wish to hide from that problem.

There is a lot happening on the iPad. One of the coolest new things is called “AirPlay.” What does it do? It lets you push video to your Apple TV with the click of a button.

Today Squrl brings Hulu, YouTube and Netflix (amongst others) to the AirPlay table. This is very significant. My video watching behavior has changed more in the past month since getting Squrl and another iPad app that’s coming tomorrow than it has since I first got a Tivo years ago.

More on this tomorrow, but there’s something very significant going on here, don’t miss it. Here’s a video first look at Squrl, reprinted from Rackspace’s Building43 site:

Video, it seems, is everywhere. From Hulu to Netflix to YouTube to Vimeo, keeping track of it all can be a daunting task. Squrl is solving that problem with innovative ways to capture and curate video from the Internet.

“There are a lot of different video choices and a lot of different video apps,” explains Mark Gray, CEO and Co-Founder of Squrl. “We believe that users want to centralize that and want to manage that better. So with the plethora of video that’s now available…and more and more content starting to go a la carte, people need a better way to manage that and manage across all those different video experiences.”

Squrl allows you to aggregate and organize videos in one location. You can bookmark videos you find while browsing the web on your iPad, Mac or PC. You can capture any video that you tweet or retweet. And you can forward video links via email to your email address that Squrl provides, and the system will add the videos to your collection.

Discovery is also a big part of the service, as you can find new videos in several different ways. First, you can search the curated content that’s already within Squrl. “We believe that this next evolution of video is about people that are watching videos starting to curate that content into meaningful collections,” says Gray. “We allow you to search that.” The second way is to search any given web site, such as Netflix. Finally, you can subscribe to someone else’s content and receive push notifications when videos have been added to their collections.

“What we’re hoping to do with Squrl,” explains Gray, “is make [managing video] fun and easy as opposed to what it is today.”

More info:

Squrl web site: http://www.squrl.com/
Squrl on Twitter: http://twitter.com/squrl

This letter is to my dad, we got him an iPad for Christmas.

Dear dad,

Alex told me he counseled you against buying any apps that cost money. Sounds like Ben also is of that bent. Sounds great to be a cheapskate, right? After all, you’ll save money. I’d question my brother’s motives, though. Maybe they want more inheritance?

Anyway, to me the best apps cost money and you should expect to spend $200 to $400 in the first year on apps. Here’s some reasons why.

1. Paid apps are better games. Look at Angry Birds. They have free versions on Android, but on iPad and iPhone their versions cost five bucks. The thing is, on the free version you have interruptive advertising. Do you really want to live in a world where every few minutes an ad gets displayed? I don’t. So I invest in apps that cost money and apps that have a real business model behind them (IE, where I’m at least a customer that turned over some cash). Plus, I know that Scrabble is one of your favorite games. That costs $4.99. What a deal.

2. Paid apps help teach science. I know you do lots of tutoring at local high schools. One of the most expensive apps, The Elements, costs $14. This app is magical, though, and will open science up to kids in a new way. I wish I had this back when I was in Chemistry class.

3. Paid apps reward the arts. There’s a photographer, Quang-Tuan Luong. He took 10 years to photograph all the US National Parks. 3,000 photos. And you can own them all for $4.99. If enough people do that? Well, then, it’ll encourge more photographers and artists to share their work in apps.

4. Paid apps help you travel. The best apps, like TripIt, have “pro” versions that cost money. In this case TripIt costs me $49 per year. What do I get? Information. I often know my flight is delayed before the pilot tells everyone else. And it helps me get alternate flights and helps me with finding the best seat, and more.

5. Paid apps help you get better news. The Wall Street Journal costs $17+ a month. I know you buy lots of magazines and newspapers, why would it be any different on an iPad?

6. Paid apps help you read longer items. I paid $4.99 for Instapaper, which helps save web pages for later offline reading, optimized for readability. Invaluable.

7. Paid apps help you find better restaurants. Yeah, you can use the free Yelp app (I do that too) but Zagat’s app is better for finding the best restaurants. It costs $10. What’s a meal at a high-end restaurant cost? $50? Some, like at French Laundry, cost $330 and up. Having one extraordinary experience is worth the app’s price. Why? Because they can afford to have moderators that clean up the content, plus they have hooks into other systems, like Foodspotting and Foursquare, which give them better data.

Anyway, there’s some selfish reasons to pay for apps, too.

1. App developers are watching what platforms make the most money. So, if you want better apps, support the developers and they’ll work on more stuff for you. Otherwise they’ll go work on other platforms that have more customers that’ll pay for apps.

2. It gives you leverage. If they start selling all your private information, you’ll be able to scream about it. People who only use free apps should expect there’s some other business model in play behind the scenes.

3. The quality of the apps is higher when you pay for them. Do you work for free? I don’t. Neither do my cheapskate brothers. Yet they want everything for free. But, who do you think developers will do their best work for? A group of people who spends $5 to $15 on them? Or a group of people who forces them to do unnatural acts like put ads into their apps (which encourages them to sell your privacy down the street)?

Me? I’m a selfish baaassstttarrrrddd. I want the best experiences, and I’ve found the best way to get those is to pay for some apps.

–Your son, Robert

Although its copyright settlement with publishers is still in legal limbo, Google has announced that it will be starting to sell e-books through an online storefront early this summer. Like Apple and Amazon, Google's store would see it offer up in-print books obtained from publishers, which will retain their ability to set the prices for these works. But there's every reason to expect that the same storefront will be awash with out-of-print books the minute that Google can get a settlement for its ongoing lawsuit approved.

Google apparently dropped the news at a publishing industry event, sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group, and held in New York City. It has since been picked up by, well, just about everyone (many reports seem to be crediting a Wall Street Journal story for the announcement).






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By now, everyone has an opinion on the walled gardens Apple has erected around the iPhone, the iPad and the apps that run on them. The company is simply curating its platform, or it’s micromanaging developers to death. It’s nourishing the most successful computing platform of all time, or it’s suffocating innovation. It’s advancing the computer, or pushing it backwards. So divisive is the debate that it sometimes feels like the culture wars have come to Silicon Valley.

Whether you think Apple’s efforts to control the iPhone OS environment are helping or hurting, its ability to do so will eventually break down. Control never lasts forever — especially on the web, where entropy seems to be a guiding principle. The question is when Apple’s control will start to break down. I think it already has.

But while my reasoning is partly tied to the broader debate about open vs. closed systems, it has much more to do with a development that’s taken place over the past few months, one that even most technophobic Apple customer can grasp immediately: Apple isn’t just refereeing technical violations like private APIs; it’s refereeing morality.

It started when Apple pulled 5,000 apps from the App Store because of sexual content — though an arbiter of porn, even one with the best of intentions, will always end up with all sides angry with them. Apple’s shifting stance on political satire ignited another brush fire. It banned, then allowed Mark Fiore’s iPhone app; now, any aggrieved yahoo with a rejected app can fashion himself as a First Amendment martyr.

I’m willing to accept that Apple is trying doing the right thing for its customers. In one sense, Apple is like Walmart, or any retailer that excludes magazines and books with content it deems too sexual or politically controversial. But Apple is more than just a retailer — it’s the provider of a platform, and a wildly successful one. Apple can control its platform on a small scale, but as success expands that platform domain, the company’s control inevitably breaks down as it starts to create more problems than it solves.

The problems affect developers, content partners and consumers. To avoid having to explain its capricious approval system, Apple has retreated into an opaque cloud of inscrutability, making telepathy a vital skill for successful developers. As publishers large and small bring their content to the iPad, Apple’s murky morality may give them pause — or worse, lead to self-censorship. And curating controversial content in a way that leaves all parties unhappy is hardly a savvy way to market a hot new product to consumers.

Apple has often demonstrated an ability to be flexible. In January, it eased some controls on the app approval process in an effort to speed it up. It recently allowed Opera Mini into the App Store, an exception to its rule that third-party apps not compete with its native offerings. And iPhone OS 4 will finally concede to longstanding calls for the iPhone to multitask third-party apps.

So the company is likely to reassess its control-freak tendencies as well. It has three choices: One, hold to the status quo; two, curate its platform, but add a set of clear guidelines as to what’s allowed and what isn’t, or maybe a curtained-off section for controversial apps; or three, adopt an open environment where apps are rejected only on technical considerations. The first will only add to confusion. The second might work if the guidelines are explicit enough. The third is the simplest, but involves giving up a lot of control.

My guess is Apple will go for option No. 3. Not right away, but in increments. In the early days of the web, ISPs faced a similar choice and decided not to control what customers could read. Apple will always favor a closed architecture that lets it offer a web experience on its terms. But in time, even its curated experience will look more more like the messy reality we see on the web today.

Related GigaOM Pro Content:

Needed: A Neiman Marcus for Mobile Apps
Will Killer Apps Affect Which Handsets Consumers Buy?

Image courtesy of Flickr user herwings.

I’ve seen a lot of angst over the past week about Facebook’s moves to open up your data to other applications.

To really understand how huge these changes are I had to get away from Silicon Valley and come and hang out with the geeks in Kinneret, Israel where famous VC Yossi Vardi is throwing an exclusive camp for geeks and successful business innovators.

To be sure, there is some fear and even a bit of hatred here of Facebook. Let’s detail that fear and hate:

1. Facebook has broken an invisible privacy contract with its users. Most of the geeks here say they expected Facebook to be about sharing photos, videos, and thoughts with friends and family. But now their previously private data is showing up on Yelp, Pandora, and Spotify. That wasn’t expected by the users, so has generated quite a bit of discussion here.
2. Facebook is very quickly painting the web with little like buttons and other social widgets. One CEO I talked with, who asked me to keep his name and company name out of this article but who runs one of the top 50 websites according to Comscore and Compete.com, told me his company will add Facebook’s likes next week. He’s not the only one saying that. My prediction that 30 of the top 100 Websites would incorporate Facebook’s likes in the first few months might turn out to be very low, based on what I’m hearing in Israel. But that does worry geeks here who are seeing that Facebook is very quickly getting their fingers (and branding) into a very large chunk of the web.
3. I’m sharing a room with one of Yahoo’s search strategists here at Kinnernet and, while he wasn’t able to tell me what direction Yahoo is going in, it’s clear that Facebook has disrupted his thinking of where the world is going. If Yahoo is feeling the disruption imagine what it must be like over at Google! Facebook is studying metadata from all these likes and other behavior of ours and I believe is preparing new kinds of search and discovery services. Facebook doesn’t need to “kill” Google to have quite an effect, either. They just need to put a box around Google which would keep Google from growing. What happens when Google can’t grow the way it wants to? Flat stock prices and loss of ability to hire the best employees that comes with it. Google is the new Microsoft, the geeks here say.
4. The geeks here say that it is clear that Facebook is becoming a dramatically more important, and larger, company than they expected. So, now, new business plans are being changed to account for Facebook’s new power and stance in the world.

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

Well, first of all, what can government do?

1. They can force Facebook to switch its defaults on its new Instant Personalization program, which is already being used by Yelp and Pandora (you can see which music I listen to, for instance, on Pandora, and that feature got turned on automatically. The government could force Facebook to turn that feature off by default and make me “opt in” for you to see my Pandora music.
2. They could fine Facebook for its behavior.
3. They could call Mark Zuckerberg in front of Congress and call him nasty names.

But what else could the government do? I don’t see too many options. Do you?

So, why is it too late to regulate Facebook?

1. The damage is done. Well, let’s assume they made them switch Instant Personalization to opt in. Who cares? The damage is done. My Pandora already has all your music shared with me. Most Facebook members won’t change their privacy settings from what they already are. So, old users will keep sharing their music and only new members will be asked to opt in to these new privacy-sharing features.
2. The regulation will come too slowly. Government never moves fast. Even when it’s motivated. So Zuckerberg has at least a few months to aggregate his power before Government slaps him on the hand. Government is not going to be able to prevent that top 50 website from putting Facebook’s new features into its service. Government will not keep me from using Pandora.
3. The regulation will come after we get used to new privacy landscape. Already I’m finding I’m getting used to the fact that you all can see my data and that I can see yours. So, if Government comes along and tries to regulate that it will get pushback from me. Why? Well, I actually like the new Pandora features. I’m finding a ton of cool music because Zuckerberg forced you to give up some of your privacy. So what that I can see that you like Kenny G? Users will get addicted to these new features and they won’t take kindly to some government jerk taking away these new features.
4. Giving Zuckerberg a fine will not change Facebook’s behavior. If anything it will just push him to monetize these features more aggressively in order to pay the fine. Just wait until Cocacola icons show up next to all those Facebook like buttons. Government taxation, which really is what fines are, might have a negative effect long term.

So, what can be done about Facebook? I don’t see what we can do about Facebook. Not enough people have changed their behaviors due to these changes. I’m watching and these features are VERY popular. Even here in Israel, far from the hype bubble of Silicon Valley, all the geeks I talked with are impressed with the new features and many are already implementing them. No one sees Facebook as less powerful or less interesting today than two weeks ago. Even with a few of my geeky friends saying they deleted their accounts from Facebook my feed there is actually moving faster lately and my items are getting more engagement, which shows that not many geeks changed their behavior away from Facebook.

Zuckerberg just played chicken with our privacy and it sure looks like he won based on what I’m hearing here in Israel.

What do you think?

Since Facebook has become a pretty serious mainstay of social media, researchers have become interested in using it to find out which types of social interaction people prefer. A study done at the University of Missouri used physiological data to determine that Facebook users enjoy seeking out specific information and interactions, like Facebook wall posts, far more than more general and passive uses, like browsing the newsfeed or other aggregated sections.

In the experiment, 36 participants were tracked while they browsed Facebook from their own accounts. Researchers monitored physical outputs that correspond to emotional and motivational responses, such as skin conductance and eye movement; they also took screen shots and timed how long participants spend on each page. They broke down Facebook use into two categories: social browsing—looking at newsfeeds, invites pages, and so on—and social searching, such as seeking a friend's profile page or writing on a friends' wall.

The results showed that users spent the most time on activities that were classified as social searching, and had stronger responses to them. Ocular monitoring suggested they also experienced more "pleasantness" during those interactions. Over time, social searching remained more interesting, according to eye movements, while social browsing was a bit boring, and became more so as time elapsed.

The researchers say the data suggests that social searching, or interacting with an individual's more complete information rather than a sea of informational clips, stimulates an appetitive response. Appetitive responses are typically initiated when a person encounters something that promotes species survival, according to the authors. Taking steps to make friends contributes to survival, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.

However, the results pose an interesting paradox for Facebook, as it seems the things we're most interested in are buried a level deep in searches or menus. Furthermore, the newsfeed, a flagship feature that's intended to combine Twitterlike aggregation and extensive content controls, is the one we care far less about than in-depth knowledge about our friends. It seems we'd rather use Facebook for its more unique feature—interactions and profiles that tell us where our friends work and what movies they like.

Researchers note that they did not study some secondary features of Facebook, such as games like Farmville or Facebook Marketplace, but that they might be worth looking into.




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If the end of privacy is so evil, so awful, so unthinkable, then why am I liking the new Pandora so much?

See, in the past three days since Facebook announced major new changes to its social contract with all of us, I’ve been able to study my friends’ personal musical tastes in a way I couldn’t just four days ago.

Here, come on over to the new Pandora on my screen. I click on “Friends’ Music” and now let’s look through what I can see.

I see that Aaron Roe Fulkerson, MindTouch’s Inc founder and CEO, listened to Toad the Wet Sprocket. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

I see that Adrian Otto, chief of research at the Rackspace Cloud (where I work at), listens to Kenny G. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago. Aside: Kenny G, really dude? Heheh.

I see that Alan Cooper, father of Visual Basic, and head of a famous software design studio that bears his name, listens to the Barenaked Ladies. I bet he didn’t quite realize that I’d be able to see that a week ago.

Should I keep going? I have 1,300 friends over on Facebook and a lot of them use Pandora.

To me this is freaking awesome. I have found more music in the past week than I’ve found in the past year.

Oh, yeah, and you can see my own account and see how my musical tastes are changing thanks to this new feature.

But, on the other hand, this new feature has heralded a new age where we move closer to the end of privacy.

While listening to music that now is shared by all my friends I’ve been reading thousands of words about how Facebook screwed its contract with us to keep our stuff private.

Here’s one thread from DeWitt Clinton that talks about why he deleted his Facebook account. Here’s a story on Techcrunch about a bunch of Google employees leaving Facebook. And finally, here’s yet another thread, started by Louis Gray, about those employees leaving Facebook (in the comments there I lay out why Google’s employees made the wrong decision).

If you read those posts — and all the comments in them — you’ll see that there’s a lot of people who are very disappointed with Facebook’s moves pushing us all to be more public.

Personally I have not taken a good stance on this lately in public.

First, what has been my public stance? Privacy is dead.

Why did I take that stance? Because, personally, I’m bored with the discussion about privacy.

Why am I bored?

Because the people who are against having their previously-private stuff shared with the world (whether it was when Google Buzz shared my email connections that I made in Gmail with everyone, or it was when Facebook forced everyone to accept being public and to reconfigure their privacy settings and, in some cases, taking away a few ways to keep their stuff between them and their friends) don’t discuss is my Pandora example above. They don’t admit that there’s a lot of goodness that comes from pushing us to be more public with our lives.

The truth is I — as a user — get more features everytime the industry moves us toward a more public world.

Google did this when they put a cookie on my machine that nearly never expired. I remember employees at Microsoft thinking that that was a horrid move against their privacy (they knew that that meant that their surfing behavior could be studied by Google at a rate that Microsoft’s search engine wouldn’t be able to do because Microsoft had a stricter stance toward protection of privacy). I remember telling those employees to get over it and that soon our entire online lives would be shared and that Google would gain massive adoption because of the features that afforded it.

Google is NOT blameless here. They have moved us a long way toward a world where we have no privacy. Even Google’s CEO’s home address was shared with the world via Google. Today we are sharing that kind of data with each other all the time as we post stuff with geotags applied to it or check in on Foursquare or Gowalla.

But last week was about Facebook’s moves and Facebook pushed us another inch toward the cliff of no more privacy. Is that scary? Well, yes! But is it good too? Well, yes! Here, listen to my Pandora music again and tell me you don’t like being able to study my previously-private life in even more glorious detail.

The truth of the matter is that we are going to live our lives from now on — at least in part — in public and we need a new kind of privacy contract with the companies that use our data.

Tonight we started that discussion where I asked my Twitter followers what the last bastion of privacy is?

We ended up that the last bastion of privacy is control. I recorded an audio CinchCast to talk about that. Control of the ability to tell our life’s story.

In that audio I told you that we are no longer in control of how our life’s story gets shared with others. For some, like me, we’ve crossed over to where we accept that loss of control. Others still hold onto the — in my view, mistaken — belief that they can control what others learn about them.

That is privacy: control of our human story. Last week Facebook took something we thought we had control of and gave it away. That pisses off a lot of people, but on the other hand, I gotta say I am loving my new Pandora music that that change brought to me.

And thus we have moved an inch closer to the end of privacy whether you like it or not.

So, now what?

1. We need new skills to deal with our new lack of privacy. How do we make sure Facebook doesn’t share what we don’t want shared? There’s lots of discussion on that around the web but we need more.
2. We need a more nuanced discussion about privacy. It’s not just about “never take my private stuff and make it public.” If it were, we wouldn’t have gotten the new Pandora features we just got last week.
3. We need more control over our data so that we can easily figure out what is going where. With Facebook it’s hard to figure that out now (I solved that by just making everything I do public, but others don’t want to live the same way I do).
4. What else? Add your thoughts to the conversation and what privacy means to you.

Talk to you later, I’m off to meet Thomas Hawk where we’ll walk around a car show in Half Moon Bay — in public — and take pictures. You’re welcome to join us. Bring your stash of great music. Oh, yeah, bring your iPhones!

Ambition.

It’s the one word that kept coming up in conversations I had around the halls today at Facebook’s F8 event. Whenever I heard that word it was clear we were talking about Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook. Compared to last week’s weak moves by Twitter, where its CEO barely even announced anything, yesterday’s moves by Facebook were huge.

OK, I heard another few words:

“Visionary.”

“Scary.”

“Huge.”

“Unbelieveable.”

“Blown away.”

“Zuck has balls.” or “Facebook has balls.”

“Big moves.”

Heck, listen to David Kirkpatrick, who worked for Fortune for more than 20 years and just finished a book, Facebook Effect, about Facebook. I catch up with him here before the press conference, which happened just after Zuckerberg and team made tons of announcements:

Listen to the words he uses: “This is not just another company, it is a transformational phenomenon.”

“It is really great, but it is really scary in some ways too.”

By the way, after I talk with David I talk with quite a few other movers and shakers in the tech press in that video so you can get a sense of how we all reacted to the news. Then, at about 20 minutes into that video you get to see the full press conference (I have the only video of it on the Web that I’ve seen so far).

Before I explain more about what I mean when I say Facebook wants to own your digital fingerprints, there are a few other reactions I want to get in here. The first is with a couple of guys from the National Hockey League. Listen to how excited they are about the new features they turned on yesterday on NHL.com. You can “like” every player there. Some players already have hundreds of likes in just the first few hours.

Then watch how Pandora’s CTO, Tom Conrad, describes Facebook’s moves and how Pandora is now much more social because of these changes. “Mark is right when he says Web experiences want to be social.”

Finally, head over to Facebook’s official site and watch some of the videos if you haven’t seen them yet.

WHY IS THIS SO AMBITIOUS?

These moves are ambitious for a few reasons:

1. It gets Facebook plastered all over the web. Already Facebook likes are on many many sites and I’d expect to see Facebook’s new social features to show up on at least 30% of the web’s most popular sites within a month.
2. It lets us apply our social graph “fingerprint” to sites we visit. You do this by adding social plugins to your site, which is pretty easy to do.
3. It lets us apply our behavior “fingerprint” to sites we visit. Again, by adding social plugins onto your sites.
4. Facebook gets to study everything we touch now and will bring a much more complete stream back to the mother ship. This lets them build new analytics features for publishers, too, as All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill writes, but now Facebook will have the best data on the web for advertisers to study.
5. Facebook gets us to keep our profile data up to date. Marketer Ed Dale nailed why this is such a big deal.
6. Facebook gets to overlay a commerce system, called Credits, on top of all this. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook writes about that.
7. Facebook has opened up to enable all this stuff to flow back and forth and has removed the 24-hour limitation on storing data gained from its API. This is probably the biggest deal for developers, Inside Facebook writes about that, but they’ve also made their API more granular so that sites can ask for, and get, very specific data instead of getting everything stored on a user. We’ll be talking about this for a while, because it actually has good implications for privacy.
8. All this new data will enable Facebook to build new kinds of search experiences, as All Facebook hints at in a post where they say Facebook is trying to build a version fo the semantic web. Search Engine Land goes further in detail about what these changes will mean.
9. It lets Facebook minimize the need for a “public” fan page, like mine. Inside Facebook explains more in detail why this is true. Mostly because they’ll spit all those bits over onto my blog, if I add the code to my blog (which I’m pretty sure I will).
10. Finally a stream of focused bits for the people who are actually visiting your page can be pushed back out to you, as Inside Facebook demonstrates.
11. They made the API much simpler and shipped a powerful graph API so more developers can build apps for Facebook (this has been one of the advantages of Twitter, for instance, because Twitter’s API was simple to figure out). Heck, you can even hit it from a web browser to see what it returns. Here is what it returns for http://graph.facebook.com/scobleizer (if you want to try it yourself, just include your Facebook name instead of mine).

Is this all a deal with the devil, as RWW asks? Absolutely! Sebastien Provencher has another concern: that Facebook will gather data but not sure the goodies back (like analytics and monetization). GigaOm’s Liz Gannes notes that Facebook now is a single point of failure for the Web. Leo Laporte says he won’t use the new Facebook features on his sites. Dave Winer goes even further and says that the answer to all this must be “no.”

These are legitimate concerns. Let’s explore why:

Let’s key in on #2: your social graph — the people connected to you in various ways — is a fingerprint. My social graph is different than yours. So, when I click “like” on a hockey player on NHL, I’ve applied my fingerprint to that hockey player. Now what if 1,000 other people do that? That site really has a lot of details about the average user that’s visiting: details they never would have had access to before. But that’s not what’s scary. What’s scary is the traffic boost that these sites will get. Why? Because those 1,000 people will drag all their friends over. Actually, no, that’s not scary either.

What we’re really scared about is another very powerful company is forming. One that we don’t yet fully trust. Heck, just a few years ago Facebook erased me from the web for 24 hours. I can’t forget that, even though now I’m good friends with most of the Facebook execs. Let’s say Facebook wanted to kick you off the system, it could, and that could have deep implications for your business, career, etc.

Now go further, we’re all going to be very addicted to Facebook’s new features very quickly. The website that doesn’t have Facebook “likes” on it will seem weird in a few months. In a few years? Almost every site, I predict, will have them, and the other components that you can check out above (and more that will come soon, both from Facebook as well as other developers).

My fears are that Facebook might turn evil and use its position against organizations, the way that Apple locks out organizations from shipping apps (do you have Google Voice app on your iPhone yet? I don’t). Imagine if Facebook wanted to turn off the New York Times, for instance. It could. And that’s a LOT of power to give to one organization, even one that’s earned my trust like Facebook has. This is why I keep hoping Google has a clue (so far it hasn’t).

Tomorrow during the Gillmor Gang I’ll try to talk about the identity fingerprints that Facebook now has under its control. It is a scary world, but one that has huge benefits to all of us.

Today I told someone like I felt like I was at the completion of a major piece of commerce infrastructure that would affect our lives for decades. I likened it to the cross-continental railroad. Remember that? Well it changed the world. It opened the west. Made new careers possible. Let fresh food from California get to Chicago before it spoiled and all that. But it created an organization that had a LOT of power that wasn’t always used well.

Today I told Zuckerberg that he now has the modern-day railroad in his grasp and challenged him to both win our trust and not abuse the major power he’s going to aggregate.

So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.

The moves Facebook made today ARE that significant. Don’t miss Facebook’s ambition.

Oh, and if you’d like to hear more later today we’ll do a special Gillmor Gang and we’ll have Bret Taylor of Facebook on to fill in more details at noon Pacific Time. Watch building43 live then.

Any debate over open vs. closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways in which companies are attempting to build code as a community effort, while still profiting from it in some way. So I chatted with Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu, about how it walks the line between spending to support open-source software and finding a business model that works.

Canonical’s 330 employees are responsible for maintaining, supporting and selling service for Ubuntu, an open-source version of the Linux operating system for servers, desktops and computer manufacturers. Some 120-150 of the Canonical employees contribute directly to the new releases of the software that come out every six months, and most of the company’s revenue comes from supporting enterprise server customers and makers of computers that want to put Ubuntu on desktops. Consumers also download the software, but few pay Canonical for support. The company is not yet profitable.

Shuttleworth believes that in order to develop a strong business model around an open approach, one has to create an open option early, ideally through a strong standardization process and one also needs to have a lot of different open-source projects fighting it out.  For example, in the operating system world there wasn’t a strong history of open alternatives, which meant that Ubuntu had to out-open its proprietary competition, which has high costs.

In that way it has pushed Canonical perhaps further out toward open on the spectrum. Shuttleworth calculates the direct costs of being so open as bringing people together in ways that empowers them and makes them feel like members of a community, as well as reaching out and putting in place the infrastructure to create a company. However, there are indirect costs as well.

“There is a myth that being open is necessarily more efficient and cheaper, but there are no hordes of people showing up to do the hard stuff,” Shuttleworth says. “Occasionally wonderful, magical things happen — really incredible things do happen, like people show up unexpectedly with brilliant ideas — but it’s still hard and expensive and you still have to be willing to do all the hard and expensive things and do it in an open fashion. And you’re still likely to be accused of being open only when it’s convenient.”

He points to the cloud computing market as one that tends to give a lot of lip service toward openness but where a lack of a big standardization effort and robust open source competition could lead to a relatively closed ecosystem.

“The basic story there is pretty bad at the moment,” Shuttleworth says. He notes that proprietary infrastructure, hypervisors and even the APIs and ways data is stored can lock folks into one cloud for life. “We need real open alternatives early in the process, making it possible for people to build own cloud infrastructure that responds to the same APIs that Amazon’s do.”

He’s accepted that Amazon Web Services’ APIs for its web services, while not created through an open standards group, have become a de facto standard and said that it’s more efficient to build open-source code around Amazon APIs rather than try to develop new ones for accessing the cloud. Canonical has a partnership agreement with Eucalyptus, which offers open-source software to create an AWS-compatible cloud, where people can use Ubuntu  and Eucalyptus to create their own cloud computing platform. But Shuttleworth would like to see more open-source options other than Eucalyptus  for building out a cloud computing service of your own.

At the platform-as-a-service level, the issue around openness will be around moving data from cloud to cloud easily. There’s room there for an open standard or open databases, he said. But at every level, when considering building a business around open source software, he he believes that “you want a common and clear standard with competing open source versions using that standard.”

That keeps proprietary vendors at bay, and gives the companies building a business around the open-source software a chance to decide where they want to be on the open-to-closed spectrum. But it also introduces the prospect of fragmentation, which we’ll leave for a later post.

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Twitter is preparing to launch several impressive new features, including a new streaming API that will give desktop client applications real-time access to the user's message timeline. The new streaming API was announced last week at Twitter's Chirp conference, where it was made available to conference attendees on-site for some preliminary experimentation. Twitter opened it up to the broader third-party developer community on Monday so that programmers can begin testing it to offer informed feedback.

This tutorial will show you how to consume and process data from Twitter's new streaming API. The code examples, which are written in the Python programming language, demonstrate how to establish a long-lived HTTP connection with PyCurl, buffer the incoming data, and process it to perform the basic message display functions of a Twitter client application. We will also take a close look at how the new streaming API differs from the existing polling-based REST API.





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The question of how to print from wireless devices has been thrust once again into the limelight recently thanks to the printing-anemic iPad. Longtime notebook and mobile device users are quite familiar with the printing conundrum—cables, drivers and all.

Google has announced that it's looking to address this problem in the form of Cloud Print. Part of the Chromium and Chromium OS projects, Cloud Print aims to allow any type of application to print to any printer. This includes Web, desktop, and mobile apps from any kind of device—potentially, this could be used on a BlackBerry, Windows machines, Macs, or even the iPad. (That is in addition to Google's own offerings: "Google Chrome OS will use Google Cloud Print for all printing. There is no print stack and there are no printer drivers on Google Chrome OS!" says the company.)





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Today at the Twitter Chirp Hack Day I talked with a ton of developers and the new feature they were most interested in. Adam Jackson echoed everyone I’ve heard today when he tweeted “Twitter Annotations is what I’ve been wanting FOREVER.”

We’ll be posting those interviews next week on building43 but there’s a lot of questions and not a whole lot of answers as to what Annotations are, so I figured I’d post what I learned today.

First, Annotations let Twitter clients attach metadata onto a Tweet.

Some things I’ve learned:

1. Annotations can be up to 512 bytes in length (although that limit hasn’t been decided for certain yet). That would let you put slightly more characters into the metadata payload than would be allowed in a tweet.
2. The metadata can ONLY be written at the time the Tweet is published and can NOT be changed or written later.
3. To get around limitations of non-updateability developers are already working on systems to point out from the metadata to other systems that CAN be updated.
4. Twitter has not disclosed how this metadata will be displayed yet (this feature will only be available to developers at first, later will be turned on first on Twitter.com and maybe not used at first on Twitter’s other clients).
5. There aren’t many rules as to what can be in this metadata. YET. All the devs I’ve talked to say they expect Twitter to “bless” namespaces so the industry will have one common way to describe common things. More on that in a second, but Steven Hodson already explained well why this new metadata payload could turn into a nightmare for Twitter. Twitter has already started communicating about some of the rules that will be coming.
6. Annotations won’t be available until next quarter, in other words, at least not until July.
7. Not sure what the experience would be like on all Twitter clients (obviously they won’t be able to be delivered to SMS clients, for instance).
8. There are a few more details already on the Twitter Development Talk list.

So, what could this be used for?

Well, let’s just imagine a developer comes up with something new he’d like to build into his clients. For instance, today at Chirp it was sunny, so I came up with a feature for describing the weather at the location where you’re tweeting from.

The old way of describing the weather was to say “nice weather in San Francisco” in a Tweet. But that takes almost 30 characters of your 140 to do.

So, why not build a new iPhone app that lets you select the weather when you tweet? (Or, even better, automatically go out to an API at weather.com or something like that, grab the current weather for the location you’re at, and shove that into the annotations metadata payload).

Sound simple enough? It is.

Except what if my app describes sunny weather this way:

weather=sunny

but some other developer wants to describe it this way:

weather=nice

And yet another developer wants to describe it this way:

weather=80 degrees fahrenheit with no clouds

And yet another developer wants to describe it this way:

weather=blue sky

Get the problem? Every client would need to figure out what the string in the metadata really was trying to say and they each might get it wrong, or might not work because some other developer used a format they weren’t expecting.

So, now, we have to have an industry conference for deciding on the right way to describe weather and we need to argue about it forever which will keep everyone from shipping a client that actually works and does something useful for users. Damn, all I wanted to do was put a nice sunny logo on my tweet in Tweetie!

Imagine this argument happening for everything.

Television show=”Lost”
Movie=”Kick Ass”
Location=”1 Market, San Francisco, CA”

I can imagine lots of ways to describe each of these things, can’t you?

Heck, to IMDB “Kick Ass” is actually “http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1250777/”

And so on, and so forth. Mahendra gave some other examples of how Annotations could be used.

But it gets worse than that.

I might want to point my tweets at a commenting system, but Disqus will use a different code than JS-Kit will. So, now we’ll have different commenting systems that can’t be replaced later. What if Disqus goes out of business, or changes their strategy or name? Now my old Tweets won’t work?

One nice thing is Twitter’s dev team is taking an open approach with this. They want to hear from developers on their development talk page (just opened) about how you’ll want to use this new feature.

My real question is “can we all get along?”

Why is this important? Well, this lets developers build new curation, bundling, and other systems. I hope the industry can get it right.

Have you started thinking about Annotations? How will you use them?

UPDATE: I’ve been putting other posts, like this one from Liz Gannes, about the Chirp conference, onto my Twitter Favorites Feed.

Apple has announced it is selling far more iPads than it expected and is delaying the worldwide launch by a month.

I am seeing this problem in US too. There are lines in stores (when I went back to buy a third iPad I had to wait in line). The demand is nuts for iPads.

So why did Apple guess its prediction so wrong? Several reasons:

1. They didn’t realize just how many apps would ship on day one and how good the quality of those apps would be.
2. Even the app developers never had their hands on iPads (I talked with several developers, even at “hot” companies like Evernote, while waiting in line, and they had to develop their apps without even seeing an iPad) so the marketplace couldn’t tell them before it shipped just how hot this would be.
3. The focus groups that Apple talked with didn’t hype it up enough with the people studying the groups. This is because they, themselves, didn’t have the apps (the iPad without apps is pretty lame, actually).
4. They didn’t realize how fast skeptics would be convinced. I’ve seen this myself. My son was very skeptical before it came out, saying he didn’t want one. The minute he put his hands on it he started changing his mind and within five minutes of using it said “I was wrong.”

This is one of those dangers that Apple has: predicting demand is really tough when your market really can’t see the complete product before it ships.

On the other hand, this is a very positive sign for Apple. It means that the iPad is moving outside of the “Apple faithful” very quickly, which I have also observed in the stores. The people I met buying iPads a few days later from the opening were quite different than those of us waiting in line.

Apple has a runaway hit. Bummer for those of you waiting for yours.

UPDATE: on the other hand, lots of people are skeptical, including ZDNet.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session that Google has now made available to the public.

Schmidt made two specific comments about resource allocation, saying that the hardest and most pressing engineering issues facing Google today are around sharing and mobile. He was talking to the enterprise execs present but his statements were so absolute I think it’s fair to apply them more broadly.

“Companies are about sharing,” Schmidt said. “One of the new things in the last five years about the web is that it enables sharing-sensitive apps.” He continued:

I think of calendars as incredibly boring, but I’m wrong, calendars are incredibly interesting because they’re incredibly shared. So from a computer science perspective, all of a sudden we have our top engineers who want to build calendars. I’m going, what’s wrong with you guys? But in fact it’s a very interesting example. Spreadsheets are similar, the most interesting spreadsheets are highly, highly interlinked, something I didn’t know, and was not possible with the previous technology — Microsoft technology made it very difficult because they were not built in that model.

Schmidt also recommended to the executives present that: “You should always put your best team on your mobile app that enables your service. The answer should always be mobile first.”

As the mobile Internet becomes central for both consumer and corporate users, the core product questions are interoperability, security and safety, Schmidt said. “What’s important is to get the mobile experience right, because mobility will ultimately be the way you provision most of your services,” he added, saying that Google considers phones, tablets and netbooks mobile experiences.

Lastly, to make good mobile, web and diskless computer (aka Chrome OS) apps, Schmidt had a platform recommendation as well: “From our perspective the single most important development has been the arrival of the HTML 5 standard.”

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Anders Carlsson, an Apple employee, announced today on the WebKit mailing list an evolution of the WebKit project called WebKit2.

WebKit2's major aims are to bake both a "split process model" and a non-blocking API into the WebKit product—and by extension into Safari and any other client which takes advantage of the WebKit2 framework.





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About six months ago, I wrote about Augmented Search, a new way of enhancing search results. It was developed by Xmarks, a San Francisco-based company that started life as Foxmarks, a Firefox plugin that backed up browser bookmarks on its servers and allowed consumers to sync browsers on different machines. (You can read how Augmented Search works here.)

Based on that concept, Xmarks is launching a new product called SearchBoost. “As I hinted earlier, this is our business model,” said James Joaquin, the chief executive officer of Xmarks. “The paid service overlays ratings and reviews onto their pay-per-click (PPC) ads across the 450 million searches performed by Xmarks users each month.” The company currently has 4.5 million active add-on users and has a billion bookmarks in its database. Joaquin says that the company ran “an extensive 30-day test across 200K users and found that, on average, SearchBoost increases PPC click-through rates by 15 percent.”

Well now all they have to do is find customers and convince them to pay for this service.

Recommending relevant content can be dramatically effective. After The Filter, a white-label content recommendation system, was implemented on the video site Dailymotion in March, the site experienced a 40 percent increase in time spent and a 25 percent increase in video streams per visit.

Now, after successful trials, The Filter has secured its biggest media partner to date, NBC. The company will power recommendations for short-form videos on NBC.com such as clips from shows such as “Saturday Night Live.” At a time when the video experience is fragmented and competitive, getting a user who actually visits your site to stick around for more than a couple minutes is huge. It’s something folks like YouTube think about a ton.

I was on a panel with The Filter CEO David Maher Roberts at SXSW where he talked about the fascinating array of signals for making recommendations. During a prep session he told me, “We remember but we also forget. Tastes change. What you’re listening to right now is much more important than what you listened to in the last few weeks.” The Filter, which is backed by Peter Gabriel with $8.5 million in funding and initially tried to be a destination site, says it has 95 million uniques across its partners.

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Social Advertising Models Go Back to the Future

Last Friday night I was sitting on a street corner in Palo Alto. Why was I there? To hang out with the geeks and to get the latest shiny object that Steve Jobs and team had spent that same night stocking the store shelves with.

But while waiting in line someone said “did you know the guy who started Chatroulette is here?”

While thoughts of some guy showing his penis on a street corner did go through my head, I wanted to meet Andrey Ternovskiy. Why? It’s not every day you meet a 17-year-old high school student from Moscow who launches a web service and three months later has 20 million unique visitors a month (he showed me his Google Analytics, they are what every entrepreneur dreams of having happen).

So I sat next to him. I think I had to kick a potential investor out of his seat to do that. Seriously Andrey had two investors hanging out with him all night long. I quickly figured out that he was using a version of Chatroulette I had never seen. It had a nicer layout and had a new feature: he was playing chess with someone else in the world. No penises, either.

But then he freaked me out and up popped a code screen, he made some changes, then went back to testing. “What are you doing?” I asked. “I’m testing a feature.”

“Do you mind if I record you?”

“No.”

If you are on an iPad you can’t use the Flash player that I just embedded of my interview, but every CinchCast I do (Cinch is an app I use on my iPhone and iPads that lets me record and distribute to you audio recordings) also has an MP3 file that does work on iPad, here’s the one of the interview I did with Andrey while waiting in line.

“I want to get some feedback,” he said.

And with that we need to move our focus from Andrey to Eric Ries. What is Eric known for? Coming up with a methodology called “Lean Startups” where he puts forth some crazy ideas like you should ship 50 times a day and you should, gasp, listen to feedback.

I have a feeling Eric and Andrey would understand each other quite well. To really understand the Lean Startup methodology, I went and had a long talk with Eric, who is one of the most revolutionary thinkers I’ve had the pleasure of talking with. The conversation was so interesting it went an hour and I had to break it into two pieces just to upload it.

Revolutionary thinking that so few companies use.

But now let’s get to the epic battle part and my reactions to Jeff Jarvis who is worried that the iPad will destroy the world. I have now had a few days to use my iPad and I’m not worried.

Oh, and Jeff you’re wrong. Mostly.

See, when Jeff plays with his iPad he sees a pretty girl that doesn’t add much depth to his life.

I don’t like the metaphor. It too much reminds me of Chatroulette so let’s get away from girls and boys.

I much prefer how Dave Winer gives us a verdict against the iPad based on the comparison with other computers in his life.

If I look at the iPad the way Dave does I see all of its contradictions and shortcomings. I grok where he’s coming from.

But I don’t at the iPad as a replacement for my computers. It was something I would leave in my family room and not use very often. Sort of like a book or a magazine that I might pick up when I’m bored.

This is why the world that Jeff Jarvis is predicting won’t come around.

The iPad doesn’t kill the laptop.

“So, Scoble, why haven’t you put your iPad down since getting it?”

First that’s not really true, my son stole my iPad to read a book on it tonight so I was left watching TV and poking at my iPhone. Also, I’m using a Dell laptop to type this post out, mostly cause I can type a lot faster which lets me write boring long posts easier (maybe I should write on the iPad, it’ll encourage me to be, um, shorter with my ramblings).

I see this epic battle playing out between the old school of Time and New York Times and other mass media, who want you to look at their content and read their ads and not do much else, and the new world of Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and all the rest of the content-creation, participatory, and collaborative web services.

I haven’t put it down, though, because it has already totally changed how I view the world of media. I think the Time Magazine “look at me, I’m pretty and well thought out” view isn’t going to win, but deserves space right next to the rough-and-tumble world of blogging, Flickr’ing, Twittering, and Facebooking.

It’s Time’s fault that they haven’t made their new interface conversational. I just won’t talk about it as often as if they had thought this through a little more and stopped working so hard on making it so damn pretty. To me I remember another service that made everything pretty: Pointcast. It failed. So will this new style of “pretty.” But the iPad is an awesome way to use Twitter. So it will remain in my hands.

So, what trends are we seeing already?

First, people keep asking me what Twitter app I like on the iPad (I’m still arguing it out in my mind, give me a week, but you can’t go wrong with Twitterrific).
Second, games are TOTALLY participatory and are selling very well.
Third, apps like Smule’s Magic Piano are at the top of the charts and you can participate with people in a new way on that app.
Fourth, the app that pleased the crowds today in San Francisco wasn’t the Time Magazine app, but was the Geometry Wars game.
Fifth, when I was looking for a flight to Omaha what did I reach for? Kayak’s new app which is freaking awesome.
Sixth, what is at the top of the charts right now? Pages. Numbers. Keynote. All work related apps.

If Jeff Jarvis is right people will get frustrated and will return their iPads in droves.

Hint: they aren’t and they won’t.

This is a device that will drive us nuts and will thrill us at the same time.

What else has come along recently that’s done that?

How about Facebook? How about Twitter? (What worse tool for writing can you imagine than one that limits you to 140 characters yet it keeps getting more and more popular).

Anyway, I’m rambling and I haven’t done what Eric Ries advocates: I haven’t shipped a new feature (a new blog) in a while and I haven’t listened to your feedback. Off to do that now.

Walking around the hallways at the Where 2.0 Conference today I met tons of developers doing some very interesting things with location, but they seem to be stuck in a mode where they think where you are right now is all that matters. The photo here is of Where 2.0 organizer Brady Forrest (left) and Mike Pegg, who works on Google’s location API team.

Look at organizer Brady Forrest’s blog from today about what the big conversations are or look at NextWeb’s report about one of the coolest startups to come out of the geo space, SimpleGeo. Everyone is talking about how to better display data about what is happening right now. Or what happened yesterday.

Actually where I am right now is pretty damn boring stuff. I’m upstairs typing on my iMac. Does that help anyone have a good experience? No. Because it’s 1 a.m. and I can’t meet with you, so having a meeting right now isn’t gonna be a good outcome. I’m also home in Half Moon Bay and most of you are somewhere else. Is some business happy if I check in right now on Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, or Brightkite? No. They are all closed so they can’t offer me anything to get me to visit them. Not that I would at 1 a.m. anyway.

Would seeing what I did yesterday (along with thousands of other people) be interesting, as new company SimpleGeo says it would be? I found it really isn’t. Nothing that happened yesterday is as interesting as what we’re going to do in the future. This is why I am such a big supporter of Plancast, which lets me plan out my major events.

But there is no Plancast for location and very few people are thinking about that, at least based on my discussions with Gowalla, Foursquare, Google, and other developers working on location-based features.

Opportunity lost all the way around. Here’s why:

What am I doing right now that you, brands, my family, my coworkers, etc all would be VERY interested in?

I’m planning a trip to Israel. Just bought our tickets. That was last night’s chore.

Tonight? Starting to think about what startups I want to see, what hotels I need to get, what touristy things I want to do. I have tons of events that have already been decided for me, too, like Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet camp, or the Marker Conference, one of Israel’s tech conference, or a party at the Garage Geeks. They are all in Google Calendar.

But I keep looking around for a good way to plan my life around location. One that hooks two-way into Google Calendar. I haven’t found it yet.

First, let’s go to Google and see what’s out there. I type “trip planning” into Google and what comes up? Lots of trip planners, but they all are pretty sucky when compared to the UI goodness of Gowalla or the location utility of Foursquare (as much as I am beating on them in this post, they both are improving my life, just think of how interesting these would be to use if I could say “I plan to check in here in the future” and it could build a map and experiences for me.

There’s Rand McNally. Oh, it’s for a roadtrip. Israel? Plus, it forces you to work in the way IT wants you to work.

TripIt? I love TripIt, but it’s not for mapping out your trip to a foreign country. It’s good for sending your emails from flight carriers like United to, though, and it will tell you a bunch of stuff about your trip. Useful, but I want something that lets me plot my trip on a Map.

How about NextStop? NextStop is close. It has places, it has maps, it has interactivity. What doesn’t it have? A timeline and integration with Google Calendar. For instance, look at this guide to places to visit in Barcelona. That’s pretty cool, but I need to plan out my calendar and let you know that I’ll be in spot #4 at 2 p.m. on Sunday. No real way to do that here.

How about Dopplr? Dopplr is cool if you are a social media geek because you can see who else will be in Tel Aviv during a trip there, but it doesn’t hook into Google Calendar, so doesn’t help me keep my schedule.

How about Pageonce, which lets you see data from United Airlines and add your Google accounts? So far it’s not close to what would be useful.

So why am I rambling on?

Because of two apps, one of which I saw last night at SF’s iPhone App Showcase: Address Assistant. The other is Siri, which we’ve covered before, but has raised my expectations of what an app can and should do.

On the surface, Address Assistant is pretty lame. You add it to your Google Calendar (yes, you have to give them your Gmail password, I already yelled at them about that but I did it anyway).

Then it does something very simple: it adds contact information into my calendar. So, I did a Calendar item that said “visit Orli Yakuel” who lives in Tel Aviv and it put all her info into the calendar item.

Why is that important? Well, now let’s take it a step further. I also use Gist, which shows me all sorts of social data about Orli, like what is her Twitter address, how many times have I sent her email, what’s her Facebook address, and a ton of other things.

OK, now look at what the system knows.

1. Google Calendar knows I’m visiting her on May 4 and attending her Techonomy event.
2. Plancast knows I’ll be at that event, and even has a map and knows other attendees.
3. Gist knows all about Orli and if Orli put her physical address into that, it would know that too.
4. Plancast also knows that I’m going to TEDx in TelAviv and Yossi Vardi’s Kinnernet Camp.
5. United.com, TripIt, and Pageonce all know my flight information.
6. NextStop knows that I searched on TelAviv and clicked on several items to read them.
7. Google knows I searched on “Jerusalem tours” and other terms.

What don’t ANY of these systems do? They don’t let me see my schedule on a map.

Opportunity lost.

Now, what if I could say to a map system like Google Maps “map out April 26-May5?”

Already Google Calendar has tons of information about where I’ll be and at what times and using a technology like what Address Assistant or Gist is doing, it could get quite accurate information about addresses, dates, times. It could then ask me how granular I wanted to get.

Let’s say there was a time slider along the bottom of the map. So I could slide from Tuesday morning to Tuesday afternoon to Tuesday evening to Wednesday morning to Wednesday afternoon and so on and so forth.

Let’s say I saw that I laid out my schedule badly, because I had us traveling from one side of Tel Aviv to the next. Could I just drag my appointments around on the map and reorder their schedules? Could that tell Google Calendar “things have changed?”

What’s my business justification for doing such a system?

Well, I just spent thousands of dollars on flights (Rocky and I are both going) and I’m about to spend thousands of dollars on hotels for the 10 days I’ll be there.

Advertisers can influence my purchases RIGHT NOW for a trip that won’t happen for a month.

Can they do that on Foursquare or Gowalla? No way. Google Latitude? No way. Google Buzz? No way.

It’s amazing to me that the Google Mapping team hasn’t shipped this already. Think of the billions of dollars in unsatisfied intent they are leaving on the table.

Could Facebook ship this? I doubt it.

Twitter? I doubt it.

Could Foursquare or Gowalla do it? Absolutely, but the check-in gesture these two are stuck on isn’t really appropriate. It’s more of a “I want to check in here at a future date” gesture.

Could such a system be useful when I head around TelAviv with Foursquare or Gowalla? Absolutely. It could notice that I am checking in on time according to my pre-planned schedule and could give me a badge for that. Or it could notice that I’m way off of my plan, and offer to renegotiate my afternoon commitments (as happens, maybe someone like Yossi or Orli kept us too long at lunch, or maybe we got caught in unplanned traffic).

What else could it do, though?

Well, we could leave wildcard spots open. For instance, let’s look at my plan for tomorrow. I have to meet Eric Ries in San Francisco at 9 a.m. The system should know I have to drive from Half Moon Bay to San Francisco. Can I leave 15 minutes for a coffee stop? Can the system use Siri to negotiate with the APIs from those coffee shops as to what is going to be the cheapest cup of coffee I could get? Sure!

Or, when I leave Eric’s place I’ll have an hour free for lunch. Could it use Foursquare to see what location between Eric’s house and my house has the most friends right now? Sure! Could it use Yelp to find the best reviewed fast-food restaurant on the way home? Sure! Could it hook up with Waze to warn me that someone has reported a traffic accident on the way home? Sure!

All of these are ways for businesses to advertise, negotiate with you over terms (Yelp already does this with its offers from businesses near you and so does Foursquare, it’s just that both of those systems only know about my location right before I get there if they are relying on the “check in” gesture). But I already know I will be in San Francisco next Monday and I will be in Tel Aviv on April 27th. Why can’t those same restaurants be pitching me now?

The focus on “here we are now” (or worse, games, like all the leaders are using) is leading the location based service industry down a path away from the real money and away from real utility and that’s a damn shame.

Or, do you think I’m headed down the wrong path? Let’s talk about it. I’ll show up on Google Buzz, Facebook, or on my blog’s own comments to discuss the location industry further.

I’m one of those people who has a tough time trying to schedule meetings. What’s worse is that times change, mostly because of the ever-shifting deadlines that come with blogging. That’s one of the main reasons my calendar constantly descends into chaos. I turned to professional help, but if you are both like me and are a Google Calendar user, scheduling help could now be as simple as turning on a feature inside Google Calendar.

The new gadget, available in Google Calendar Labs, is called Smart Rescheduler. And it is dead simple. Once turned on, you can select an event and click “Find a new time” and the machine does the rest, offering up multiple options for folks to chose from.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.

“That’s a search type problem and so we looked at our search algorithms and said yes, we can adapt these,”Mistery said. He pointed out that this can be used by consumers who are trying to schedule say dinner parties.

Cyrus Mistery, Product Manager for Google Calendar told GigaOM that there are over 2 million businesses using Google Apps and many of them are large companies with many executives. “It becomes very hard to schedule meetings,” he said. While it is easy to find the next open spot or as Mistery called it, “a trivial computer science problem”, the harder problems emerge when say a meeting needs to happen before end of the week, without open slots and one person is in a remote location.
David Marmaros, creator of the gadget, writes on the Gmail Blog:

[W]e decided to apply some of Google’s search experience to the problem of scheduling. We experimented with using ranking algorithms to return the most relevant meeting times based on specified criteria like attendees, schedule complexity, conference rooms, and time zones. Just like Google search ranks the web, our scheduling search algorithm returns a ranked set of the best candidate dates and times. [...] You’ll see ranked list of possible times for your meeting. By investigating the calendars others have shared with you, Google Calendar can make some educated guesses about how easy it might be to reschedule a conflicting meeting and even find you a replacement conference room nearby. This process is 100% automated [...]

I just tried it out, rescheduled a meeting, and yes: it works as advertised. For once, I am not going to complain about a Google product. :-)

Additional reporting by Liz Gannes.