What kinds of things can they do to compete with Google? Scoble suggests that some Mahalo-type strategies could be in order.

Among other things discussed are: quality of search and how Microsoft compares to Google, mobile search, and how Microsoft intends to convince people to actually use their service.

Based on Goldberg’s response to that last issue, citing a recent deal with HP, it sounds like they intend to incorporate their service more heavily into pre-loaded programs that come with PCs, inspiring people to just use what is in front of them.

I could see this working for the lazy and for those with no search engine preference, but I don’t see it swaying many faithful Google or Yahoo users.

He does, however acknowledge the need to do something different and attention-getting for this reason.

Goldberg says that "search will verticalize", when asked about real-time web services like Twitter and FriendFeed.

Now that’s an interesting concept to wrap your mind around.

The video comes in at just over a half-hour, but it’s a good open look at the way Microsoft is thinking about the future with regards to search.

Scoble didn’t take too kindly to this implication, saying that "A business that blames its best users is one that’s in trouble. Serious trouble."

So in Scoble-fashion, he wanted to get to the bottom of this and "clear the air", which he did so by meeting with the co-founders of Twitter.

What was originally intended to be just a discussion amongst them, turned into something of a video interview, since Scoble had his phone handy, and they agreed to let him record it.

Right away, Evan Williams, one of the co-founders said, "“For the record, we are never blaming Scoble.”

Other co-founder Biz Stone admitted that Twitter’s service is "not up to par" and that its team doesn’t have "good enough technology to deal with the loads that Twitter is seeing". They also admitted that they may experience problems for months.

The subject of Twitter making their code open source so that outsiders could help solve their problems came up, but was basically shot down, though they admitted to only having four engineers with no experience in solving this type of problem.

Well, it would seem that something has to give somewhere. It was mentioned that money is no factor in the company’s current woes, so at least they have that going for them. Money tends to solve problems.

At least we can all rest now knowing that it’s none of our faults, and is only Twitter’s. 

http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer

http://www.twitter.com/scobleizer

Why am I doing both of those instead of blogging? Easy: I’m listening to more than 16,000 people there and that starts interesting conversations.

Coming soon (mid-April) is a redesign of my blog and FriendFeed will play a big part in that.

Today I’m going over to interview the FriendFeed folks. Watch http://www.qik.com/scobleizer for live video from there at about 11 a.m.

FriendFeed, in particular, shows my work on a bunch of different services, not just on one. You’ll see my YouTube videos, my Twitters, my Google Reader’s shared items, my interactions with a very rapidly-growing community on FriendFeed, my Upcoming event additions, and a bunch of other stuff.

Is this the new blogging? Well, my blog here is now for longer, more thoughtful pieces and the pressure to publish every day here is far far less than it was a year ago.

Comments

I’m sorry I didn’t break the news on my blog, but breaking it in front of thousands of people at a major industry conference is OK too (Arrington, who wrote the post, was in the audience) because people got to see my real, unfiltered, reaction.

UPDATE: I didn’t know that Arrington was going to post about it then. Dave Winer was sitting next to him in the audience and gives his point of view.

I told everyone that it was true that I had decided to leave PodTech, but that Fast Company hasn’t been signed yet and that I’m still considering two options, one of which is Fast Company. My last day there will be January 14th. I am working on a number of PodTech initiatives, including the CES BlogHaus as well as a Blogger Bus Tour to CES from San Francisco to Las Vegas which is sponsored by Microsoft (more on the bus, as well as how you can get a seat, next week when I get back into the office).

So, what will happen on January 15th? I told the audience at LeWeb that things haven’t been wrapped up yet. I have two options I’m considering on the table and will announce what I’m doing on January 15th.

How did it leak? Well, I needed advice between these two options and so I ask my friends to give me advice (actually, Rocky and I have been thinking a lot about this and have turned down a half dozen other options). I talk too much, which is my downfall, but also I got some world-class advice from people all over the industry.

Why didn’t I blog about it? Because I had family and other committments between the panel and now (it’s currently 2:24 a.m. and we’re packing to come home now).

Why not be transparent on the blog? Wasn’t that the lesson of Naked Conversations (our book that studied how 188 businesses used blogging)?

If you read Naked Conversations you’d know that we don’t recommend putting everything about your life on your blog. We even have a whole chapter about people who’ve gotten fired because they put inappropriate things on their blogs.

Certainly discussing career moves on a blog is inappropriate if you don’t have a clue what moves you’ll make (staying at PodTech was always on the table as one of the options until a week ago, for instance, when Rocky and I made some decisions about what would be best for our careers going forward).

Why not stay at PodTech? PodTech went through a lot of managerial chaos earlier this year and I was trying to help PodTech get to profitability and help it get some focus, business wise. You’ve seen some of those moves already as PodTech has moved away from an editorial focus and toward an corporate media development one, which is where much of PodTech’s revenues (which are in the millions per year now) are coming from. That’s a decision I helped PodTech make and I think they are good ones and will help it avoid the TechCrunch Dead Pool. Companies need a lot of help creating media, so PodTech has a pretty good future opportunity ahead of it, which is why its investors continue to support it.

When did I make this decision? In the past week. I know that back in October I said I wasn’t going to leave PodTech, but a lot has changed in that two-month period. PodTech’s new management team has been working together a lot better, and the direction it’s been going is different than it was back in October.

Now that PodTech is getting some focus I found that my show needed a new home in order for it to get to the next level, too.

Before I go on, I want to thank Seagate for sponsoring my show, which enabled me to interview more than 300 people over the past year or so. Looking back at that year it’s amazing how many people have come in front of my lens.

I’m a geek, a user advocate, and enjoy doing my show more than anything else in the world other than hanging out with Milan, Patrick, and Maryam. This week I got to do all three together in Paris thanks to Loic Le Meur, and I’ll always be in his debt for that. I’ll also, too, always be in debt to PodTech and John Furrier for hiring me and encouraging me to do a daily video show and giving me the resources to do that.

I’m also seeing significant changes to how you all interact with each other. Over the past year we’ve seen Twitter, Facebook, Kyte, Seesmic, Ustream, Justin.tv, Pownce, Jaiku, and quite a few other technologies get popular.

This interview with Mogulus’ CEO and Chris Pirillo’s pioneering efforts with his own live TV channel played a key role in getting me to see that there’s a new kind of TV channel possible — one that’s participatory instead of one-way — and one that would be very low cost and potentially have high revenue possibilities compared to the cost.

Remember, you don’t need a large audience to make a lot of money in this industry. I used to help edit a computer magazine, Visual Basic Programmer’s Journal (which later became Visual Studio Magazine) and that only had 100,000 subscribers, but millions in revenues. I also love the Demo series of conferences. There the audience (usually more than 1,000 people) pays more than $1,000 each to attend and everyone on stage pays $18,000 to present to that audience.

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press conference where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my professional camera in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard several times, including on the panel discussion yesterday where Jeff Pulver showed off video he shot on a small pocket camera of the recent Led Zepplin concert. He told the audience that Led Zepplin wants to buy his photos and videos because they were better than the professional ones).

At the Google Open Social press conference, instead of doing “professional journalism” and cranking out an article like other bloggers and journalists in the room I opened up Twitter and started telling people what I was hearing. Then I listened to them and asked questions during the press conference that they wanted answered. It changed how press conferences should be done in my eyes forever. Add streaming video, like AMD used the other day in another press conference, and things would be dramatically different.

Which gets me back to the headline I used here: it’s your business.

I’m watching how Loic Le Meur is building Seesmic by including the community into every decision he makes. His software doesn’t have the most features out there (Kyte.tv beats it by a mile, particularly on the mobile phone side of things, which is why I love Kyte so much) but Le Meur is building up a ton of love in the community for his approach.

The participants are in control there. It is your business.

I’m tired of getting used by companies who just use and use and use without giving me anything in return. I remember three years ago when I first heard the words “user generated media.” That term still pisses me off. I’m not a user, I’m a participant. I actually love it when Christopher Coulter calls it “loser generated media.”

So, whatever I do next will place that philosophy at the center. It is your business.

One other thing: I really have hated not being open and transparent the past year. Whatever I do next will have to put up with me talking with my friends, telling you openly what’s going on in the business and in my life, and we’ll build something fun together where we’re all equal participants. Our Photowalking series gets damn close to what I’m thinking of. It’s not lost on me that our videos in the photowalking series has more comments per video than the average ScobleShow videos do and those generally have more comments than other PodTech videos do. That’s media made by participation, not by some committee or some gatekeeper or some “A list blogger” somewhere. But using the newest technologies we can even bring participation in a photowalk to a whole new level. Justin.tv demonstrated that to me.

How will we make revenues? Well, there’s a variety of companies that are leading the way in participatory philosophies: You know, those that design products with their customers, or treat their customers as participants the way that Loic does with Seesmic. HP, for instance, is bringing its customers into help design its products. I saw a laptop at HP that was partially designed by a customer. A participant. HP is far from alone in leading that charge as well.

So, anyway, thanks for all the nice notes and let’s talk again about this on January 15th after I make my final decision and start my show down a new path.

Oh, and in late January I’ll be going to the World Economic Forum, where we’ll kick things off.

Comments

Of course, another commentator by the name of Robert Scoble says he’ll be joining up with Fat Camp to set up Fat Camp TV, so take it for what it’s worth.

Though he hasn’t responded on his blog, Scoble, who’s currently in Paris, did confirm via Twitter before announcing his general lack of availability. "It’s true," he tweets, "I’m at PodTech until January 14, 2008. After that? The deal hasn’t been signed yet, so we’ll announce it on January 15th."

Scoble also denied PodTech was financial trouble, as reported at TechCrunch.

Detractors are quick to note (or, dig in) that this is a much different tune than Scoble sang both in August and late October. In response to late summer rumors that PodTech was "a shitbag salad" and that he was leaving, Scoble, rather bluntly, denied both.

In October, Scoble denied both again, this time taking direct issue with the Fake Steve Jobs (Forbes editor Daniel Lyons) reporting that "Scoble was planning to bail in January" and that PodTech was failing.

"This is total, 100% bull####," Scoble wrote. "Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog."

Lyons, er, Fake Steve, was quick to hop on the told-you-so bandwagon, and to suggest that Scoble doesn’t follow his own advice about "radical transparency" in blogging:

"Come on, Robert. Walk the walk, baby. Be transparent. Stand naked before us. Tell us who’s offering what. Show us the term sheets. What’s that? You’re shy all of a sudden?"

Ouch. Well, I guess we’ll all find out in January.
 

Zuckerberg Lives, Is Sorry For Beacon

"We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it," he writes.

Acknowledging that Facebook "missed the right balance" of information sharing and privacy, Zuckerberg announced that not only has Beacon been changed to an opt-in system, but that as of this morning users would also have the option of turning it off completely.

Seemingly responding to Robert Scoble’s blog post yesterday that Facebook PR had done a poor job handling the Beacon situation and that Zuckerberg had been MIA since the uproar began, Zuckerberg also acknowledged that they could have done better.

"It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better."

Activist group MoveOn.org initiated the campaign against Beacon just before Thanksgiving. Adam Green, in charge of civic action for the organization views Zuckerberg’s mea culpa as a positive step.

"Sites like Facebook are revolutionizing how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy," Green told WebProNews. "The big question is: Will corporate advertisers get to write the rules of the Internet or will these new social networks protect our basic rights, like privacy?

"Facebook’s policy change was a big step in the right direction, and we hope it sets an important precedent in favor of Internet users’ rights that the entire industry follows."     

Last week I was getting an iced latte at the new Peets in Half Moon Bay. I was wearing a Blogger T-shirt. Old school. There a lady came up to me and asked “is that the Fake Steve Jobs T-shirt?”

I remembered that FSJ published his blog on Blogger and figured the Blogger logo was confusing this lady who assumed it was FSJ’s logo. Blogger, as you know, is the blog service from Google which was started by Evan Williams, er, evhead.

Anyway, I explained to her that the logo wasn’t really Fake Steve Jobs, but rather the tool he published with. Demonstrates that there’s a lot of brand power in Fake Steve Jobs.

As she walked away she said “I love Fake Steve Jobs.”

Truth be told I love FSJ too. Why?

Well.

1. He’s funny, even when he attacks me.

2. Everytime he links he sends boatloads of traffic. I don’t know why I love that, but it makes me happy to see that Fake Steve Jobs has boatloads more readers than Valleywag does (Valleywag says they have tons of traffic, but they don’t click on anything. I’ve been on both sites dozens of times and FSJ’s audience clicks at 20x the rate that Valleywag’s does).

3. He’s been talking about me looking for a job lately which brings a big smile to my face although someone shoot me if I ever take a CEO job. That doesn’t sound fun to me at all. Lucrative, yes, but not fun and I simply wouldn’t be good at that.

4. He’s a lot better writer than I am.

5. He’s a lot better speaker than I am.

6. He has a cool job at a big business magazine (Forbes).

I wish I could get FSJ on my show. Something fun would be to do a little debate about something. Remember, the guy who writes Fake Steve Jobs is actually a Forbes magazine employee, Daniel Lyons. He was the guy who wrote a cover article back in 2005 about how blogs sucked. Everyone who thinks Daniel is such a great blogger should go back and read that article and compare his beliefs back then with FSJ today. Oh, sorry, that’s not funny.

I wonder if Daniel still feels the same way about blogs attacking brand value now that he uses a blog to attack other people, companies, and things?

Or, we could be more professional and debate industry topics like the state of Apple’s brand value or whether the Amazon Kindle is well designed or not.

Hmmm, maybe we should just do a panel session at a conference and debate about how much value Facebook is going to destroy due to horrible PR? That might be entertaining.

Facebook has the most controlling PR department outside of Apple and it sure is in the middle of a PR crisis right now.

I feel ambivalent about the troubles Facebook is having right now. Personally I’m having lots of trouble with Facebook but Facebook doesn’t care about people who have more than 5,000 friends unless they can figure out a way to monetize us. Everytime I look at Facebook I am reminded of how little Facebook cares about me. So, I care less and less about Facebook every day.

My phone number is on my Facebook entry. Interesting that Facebook could use me to answer the community’s concerns. I’d give them hours of video time on my show. But they only seem interested in talking to big-brand journalists and I’m not interested enough to pull out my Fast Company business cards to get them to pay attention. They should invite 40 bloggers who are lower on the TechMeme leaderboard than me and just have a conversation about the mess they are in. But they’ll never do that because they are so damn controlling about what they say and who they say it to.

For completeness, here’s Facebook’s official answer to the latest troubles with its Beacon advertising scheme.

Anyway, that was a really long entry to say that I’d rather read Fake Steve Jobs than log into Facebook lately. At least with FSJ I get entertained as I get bashed. With Facebook I just am reminded that there’s more than 1,000 people that I can’t help because of Facebook’s lame scalability issues. MySpace or upstart Zude are sure looking better and better. Just get that OpenSocial platform done and let’s get on with it!

Comments

Swift, who according to his stated news preferences fights bias with bias (just a poke, don’t get mad), raised enough Cain to get his profile reinstated. Dig through the charged rhetoric on his Blogspot blog (there’s a lot of poking and bleeding going on) and you find a good point:

Would Bob Dylan be banned if he didn’t sign up as Robert Zimmerman? Would someone searching for their friend Carlos the Jackal have to know that his "real name" is Ilich Ramírez Sánchez? Would Malcolm X have had to sign up under his slave name if he were still alive? Would Eric Arthur Blair have been banned from joining Facebook under the name George Orwell if he weren’t dead, too. Or is Orwell actually alive and well and running Facebook?

But Facebook wouldn’t budge. Jon Swift is not his real name and rules are rules. But then Scoble and others got involved, the term "Orwellian" got thrown around (at ZDNet, no less!), and many pointed out that even Jesus has a dozen or so profiles still active on Facebook.

Jesus Christ, not Jesus Martinez.

Facebook eventually relented. "Upon further review," Facebook decided Swift wasn’t impersonating anyone but himself and enough people on his friends list knew him by this political alter ego to give him his profile back.   

And while you might disagree with Swift’s politics or his melodramatic approach, he does raise important issues. Pseudonyms are an important, often essential, element in free speech, and if you’re going to give a large group of people the platform with which to speak their minds, you probably shouldn’t lord over them to closely, else you find yourself declaring war when you didn’t mean to.

This is total, 100% bull####. Not even deserving of a response. I’m not leaving PodTech. When, er if, I am you’ll read it here on my blog.

Interesting that not a single blogger called me this evening.

Interesting too that OUR COMPETITORS are the ones who are writing this crap. Thanks guys.

PodTech has suffered personnel issues in recent months. They fired well-regarded video blogger Irina Slutsky over the summer. A week ago, company founder John Furrier left his CEO position with PodTech, a move that made people wonder about the future of PodTech.

As Scoble noted in his response, his phone number is on his blog. People who reported on the story seemed accepting of the hint of PodTech’s passing, so much that no one called him. That’s not a good sign for a company, when a rumor by a parodist comes across as a likely truth.

Former Microsoftie Robert Scoble says it was most likely Brian McAndrews, CEO of aQuantive before Microsoft bought the company for $6 billion, that sealed the deal.

Additionally, CNet is reporting that an anonymous source has confirmed the deal was won by Microsoft. Valleywag has its own methods of confirmation, noting that head of Facebook PR Brandee Barker recently added Microsoft head of global sales and marketing Adam Sohn to her friends list.

Maybe the official announcement is expected in the next day or two, but word on the street says Microsoft finally won one, and it probably cost them up $1.5 billion for a minority stake.

*UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Microsoft shelled out $240 million for a stake in Facebook, which means the company got off cheap, Facebook isn’t worth as much as thought by some, or Microsoft bought less than a 2 percent stake.