As we prepare for our next RealTime CrunchUp on November 20th in San Francisco, we’re seeing if anything an acceleration of the phenomenon known as RealTime. Startups, cloud platform vendors, the open standards community, and virtually every software and hardware category are being refreshed and reinvented in the new model. And while there are many familiar players talking and to some degree walking the RealTime walk, some have been busy for years building and deploying the fundamentals of this “overnight success.”

A few weeks ago, I traveled to Las Vegas to attend IBM’s Information On Demand conference, and took the opportunity to sit down with Big Blue’s Steve Mills, Senior Vice President and Group Executive of the IBM Software Group. In English that adds up to Steve being The Man at the helm of IBM’s embrace of Web Services, with the software group accounting for one quarter of IBM’s $100 billion business. While others have partied down on Web 2.0 and its various social themes in perhaps a more outward facing way, it turns out IBM is very focused in the same areas, albeit with an eye toward leveraging its deep relationships with the enterprise.

If raw information accounts for the lion’s share of useful data, IBM’s investment in analytics and “mining the nuggets” suggests the company’s history of eating its own dog food with early realtime technologies like Notes and Sametime will bear fruit as IBM begins to share its best practices with customers. But what of the TwitterSphere, the social media stream of micromessages?

I went to a birthday party this weekend where I ran into a Facebook guy, a smart guy who asked me to go off the record. In fact, the whole party was supposed to be off the record. So I ignored the off the record part by insisting that I already knew the thing I was being told, and then I told him on the record what I thought was about to happen for Facebook. This being my usual m.o. which is to insist on not being NDAed except for things I don’t really want to talk about anyway, like the next version of Office.

That way, I can just make up what I want to have happen, never breaking any confidence and yet at the same time painting as plausible picture of assumed reality that it is hard to deny or in fact slow down. So here’s what I told the Facebook guy: the company has at most 3 months window to absorb FriendFeed and open the Everyone News Feed, and if that’s true (again, making all this up) then the messaging about how that’s going to work must begin immediately, like in two weeks. Then I went home and saw MG Siegler’s post and Scoble’s remake of Frenzy on FriendFeed.

OK, so I was off by two weeks. The noise about the death of FriendFeed is already off the charts, and the proof is in the lack of rejoinder from the FriendFeed team. As in: of course FriendFeed is not dead, and here’s what we’re going to do to remake Facebook in the next few weeks. Actually, that is indeed the message from Twitter, what with Lists and ReTweets and the return of Track just as soon as, well, sometime next year or so. No need for FriendFeed real soon now, because these Lists will soon be carved up and meshed together into an authority stream by the 3rd party developers.

For months now we’ve been wondering when Microsoft was going to start making moves in the social media space. Rumors of talks with Twitter have been swirling at all levels of the company, but now a subtle re-org may shed light on what Microsoft might do internally to shore up its presence in the RealTime Wave. Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has announced the formation of Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs, a new group led by general manager Lili Cheng. FUSE Labs is being seeded with a range of related talent and software by combining much of Lili’s Creative Systems Group with Rich Media Labs and Startup Labs in Cambridge, MA. In the past, she’s been able to move social technologies from the labs into product.

In an internal memo, Ozzie talks about the growing vortex of social media and realtime:

In June, I spent several days on the Microsoft campus talking with Microsoft executives about the impact of realtime and the emerging era of cloud computing. My conversation with Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie began with a discussion of the recently unveiled Google Wave, now being rolled out for testing by some 100,000 users. Ozzie followed up on his Churchill Club chat, where he described Google as taking on such a hard problem that it might limit adoption:

RAY OZZIE: Whenever you innovate like that, you don’t know what you don’t know in a lot of dimensions. And like I said, I applaud innovation. I really like that in terms of experimentation. But when you do that, I just know from the Groove experience most recently, from the Notes experience before that, when you create something that people don’t know what it is, when they can’t describe it exactly, and you have to teach them, it’s hard.

With Twitter down this morning and reports of failure all over the social Web, I figured FriendFeed would be up, if denuded by the Twitter outage. Well, sorta. In fact, FriendFeed searches are down. How the hell does a denial of service attack plague reach into the coolest service no-one will ever use, as former user Mike Arrington once put it. Is the realtime Web screeching to a halt on purpose, did rssCloud have something to do with making things too really simple, or what? For now, I’ll Blame FriendFeed.

As long as FriendFeed keeps rolling out updates to realtime, FriendFeediots like myself are smug in our uber view that no matter what happens to the rest of the Web, regardless of whether Google buys a patent-safe video codec for HTML 5, not caring whether Apple and AT&T collude to keep Google Voice out of the carrier business, not worried about whether the Sun/Oracle deal is held up for months, etc. — no matter what, FriendFeed will solve all of my social media problems before anybody else does.

Sandwiched neatly between the RealTime is God and RealTime Who Needs It crowds is a new group that embraces both positions while moving forward rapidly. These folks include Brett Slatkin of the PubSubHubub effort and Dave Winer of rssCloud.org. Slatkin and fellow conspirator Brad Fitzpatrick demoed the PSHBB architecture at the RealTime Stream Crunchup, and Winer quickly jumped in with his own implementation.

While Winer attacked PSHBB as a Google (and TechCrunch) conspiracy, the rhetoric seemed mostly in service of his own plans for a decentralized open platform not controlled by bigcos. The charges don’t make sense — PSHBB is not a Google effort but rather one started by Fitzpatrick and Slatkin on their own — and like Winer’s, proposed and delivered as an open architecture that can be spread across multiple players. In other words, they’re saying the same thing.

Digging deeper, it could be that Winer’s concern is that adoption by Google or other platform players will create a bandwagon effect that could lock out smaller independent developers. There’s certainly some truth to that dynamic, as PSHBB is already running in a number of cooperating platform implementations including FeedBurner, WordPress, and even FriendFeed, where Slatkin is active in tracking user issues. But ironically, by offering a competing framework, Winer takes away the argument of unfairness. If developers and publishers want to adopt one platform over another because it’s got more mainstream adoption, they’re free to do so. In the past, Winer has been the beneficiary of just such choices, with RSS 2.0 proliferating in no small part due to support from Microsoft on the platform side and the New York Times on the publishing side.

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie faced down two hardball questions in a Q & A wrap to a conversation with Wired editor Steven Levy at the Churchill Club. On one, a much anticipated question about Google’s new realtime collaboration tool Wave, Ozzie had put a lot of thought into the answer. He praised the small startup project as only he could, as a clone of the Groove software he sold to Microsoft while joining the company and taking the CSA reins from Bill Gates.

But he also critiqued the Google effort as “anti-Web”, suggesting the project took on such a hard problem that its complexity might curb its adoption. Nonetheless, he seemed to relish learning from Google’s effort, positioning Live Mesh as a simpler reworking of Groove in the context of integration into the Microsoft OS. For a Silicon Valley audience who probably has paid little notice to Mesh, Ozzie’s careful dissection may spark some deeper attention as Wave exits its early pilot stages and grapples with integration into Google Apps.

Not since Apple stunned a developer/media crowd by giving away free iSight video cameras has a company gone to the heart of what Jonathan Schwartz calls the tendency of not just software but hardware to trend to free. Google’s giveaway of 4,000 Android phones and 30 days of 3G answers the musical question: is that an Android phone in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Google’s HTML 5 pitch got a whole lot more interesting when developers realized the company was moving into the kind of viral marketing Apple seemed to own until recently. The App Store has created an always-on version of the developer evangelism connection, and we’ll see how effective Google is in building on the momentum created by the phone toolkit. The iPhone 3.0 release continues to keep Apple ahead in lining developer pockets with money through increased monetization scenarios. Now the differentiator will come on the media side of the equation.

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

Of course, my friends use RSS, or they used to. Pretty much every blog has an RSS feed, and aggregators like TechMeme spider RSS feeds as well as the original pages on the sites. I’ve wired up TCIT, the Gillmor Gang feed, and my YouTube feed on my FriendFeed, but that’s FriendFeed using RSS, not me. I believe FriendFeed outputs RSS, but I don’t use it.

On Friday the FriendFeed founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit debuted a radical redesign of the product for about 15 journalists, technologists, and Robert Scoble. We were asked not to discuss the details until Monday morning. I’ve been playing with the beta for the last few hours and have already come to several conclusions about what this means for the social media community and by extension enterprise computing.

First, the disruption occurring around the realtime universal message bus invented by Twitter has now spread much more widely than commonly anticipated. Twitter’s breakout in the mainstream media hints at the speed with which this technology is moving, as does Dave WIner’s fascination with harnessing Twitter while at the same time questioning the validity of a single commercial company’s dominance of the space.

Some analysts have suggested that Twitter has moved past and consumed RSS at the center of the information machine. As newspapers and other print vehicles appear to collapse, the common concerns expressed about the permanent loss and funding of the fourth estate ignore the rise of a superclass of information creation. What some call the fallow ego-driven spew of the Warholian elites is more likely to be seen in the rear view mirror as something more akin to body painting and ultimately jazz.

Without directly violating the embargo, what FriendFeed 2.0 suggests is the capture of the sense of the moment. Like a Kennedy press conference or the incredible rhythm trills of Lennon on the roof in Get Back, we’re seeing something electric and tangible appearing out of nothing. I dive in and swim in the current, swooping from swirl to eddy, then into direct communication and back to the world I’ve left behind for a moment. It still takes several moves to accomplish a single task, but the handwriting is on the wall and the time is near when we can pick up where we left off months ago.

Microsoft’s Steven Martin has ironically blown the whistle on an attempt at an “open” coalition that freezes out certain companies. Ironic in that Microsoft and IBM played this game years ago with the WS-I, an industry standards group that pointedly stonewalled Sun Microsystems’ involvement before caving under media pressure.

In a Google Groups post Introducing the Open Cloud Manifesto, Rueven Cohen describes an effort involving “several of the largest technology companies and organizations” to “draw a line in the sand.”

We are still working on the first version of the manifesto which will be
published Monday, March 30th with a goal of being ratified by the greater
cloud community. Given the nature of this document we have attempted to be
as inclusive as possible inviting most of the major names in technology to
participate in the initial draft. The intention of this first draft is to
act as a line in the sand, a starting point for others to get involved.
That being said this manifesto is not specifically targeting any one company
or industry but instead is intended to engage a dialogue on the
opportunities and benefits of fostering an open cloud ideology for everyone.

As inclusive as possible? Not targeted at any one company? Engage in a dialogue? What a load of crap that is. It’s the same back room cigar-smoke-filled scam of the good old days when Web Services first began its inexorable move to reshape computing.

Dare Obasanjo writes about Facebook’s news feed redesign and decides it is a big mistake. He’s backed by some 94% of users responding to a Facebook application poll, and cites internal gossip that Mark Zuckerberg thinks user feedback is irrelevant. I think Dare is premature in this assessment.

First of all, Facebook is not copying Twitter; it’s copying FriendFeed, who originally copied Twitter. Where Obasanjo describes two different models – phone book and micromessaging – there already are three, including personalized aggregation or what I will call the micro-portal. Facebook already had part of the last functionality, so its opening of the micromessaging stream consolidates all three legs of the tripod.

In doing so, Facebook is counting on the same relative inertia that Twitter has so carefully cultivated. The calculation is that 175 million people are less likely to move away from something than they are to wait and see what is going to happen. Twitter decided they could stonewall third parties once a critical mass was reached, parrying attempts to build competitive subservices by slowing down API access. Today’s Twitter to FriendFeed delay: a reported 40 minutes.

Now that Facebook has jumped into the activity stream, how long will it be before major platform vendors do the same? Google seems strangely quiet except for a few retracted comments from Eric Schmidt about Twitter being a poor man’s email. Speaking of poor man’s email (aren’t we all these days) Microsoft has taken a huge chunk out of Notes engagements with its on-demand Exchange Online product. But so far, no direct attacks on Twitter et al.

The Facebook announcements seem most threatening to FriendFeed, at least from a feature perspective. In recent weeks, Facebook has sprouted a number of FriendFeed constructs – Likes and Comments the most obvious. In a few cases, the new tools go a step beyond FriendFeed by making it easier to post rich media types. But there’s a catch in this ease of use, namely the Roach Motel-ian question of whether the data ever comes out.

At a time when many people are saying innovation is dead along with the economy as we knew it, I can’t help but feel the hot breath of a surge in the power of the network. As Marc Andreessen reminds in his fascinating conversation with Charlie Rose, the Internet didn’t take off until the browser. The infrastructure was in place for some time already, but when the browser appeared, the TV generation sat up and took notice.

Now we’re at the threshold of the realtime moment, and history seems to be repeating itself. For some of us, the advent of a reasonably realtime message bus over public networks has changed something about the existing infrastructure in ways that are not yet important to a broad section of Internet dwellers. The numbers are adding up — 175 million Facebook users, tens of thousands of instant Twitter followers, constant texting and video chats among the teenage crowd — a semi-secret economy of interactive media that is sucking the chewy chocolate center out of the one-way broadcast sector.

Fred Wilson finds himself on two sides of the fundamental issue of our time: the user’s right to access data the way he or she wants to. On one side, that of the user, Wilson is an investor and board member of Boxee, a startup that translates web pages into a form more easily consumable on a TV screen. One site in particular, Hulu, just shut Boxee down at the insistence of the content providers for material on the NBC and Fox-owned site.

Boxee’s popular because it leverages Hulu’s free access to mainstream content in an on-demand solution. It’s the long-awaited rollup of TV or the computer, where on demand entertainment can be watched on the big screen under computer control. The studios don’t want us getting used to that methodology, especially not when it breaks out of the tightly controlled box where you can watch for free (ad-supported) or pay (DVD and Pay per view on demand) but not free on demand on the big screen.

Twitter developer manager Alex Payne has updated the Twitter FAQ with the actual, real, honest story on the return of Track to its users. First, the relevant text:

When will the firehose be ready?

By late January, early February 2009. For at least Q1 2009, the “firehose” (the near-realtime stream of all public status updates on Twitter) will only be available to a small group of trusted partners. The firehose is a stream HTTP solution; a client connects to it and the stream begins, ceasing only when the client disconnects. Once we’re confident in the stability of the service, we’ll add partners on a case-by-case basis. We may allow a wider selection of clients to consume subsets of the public stream (that is, updates from a collection of user IDs or matching specific search terms). We do not intend to allow anonymous, unregulated public access to this stream for any number of legal, financial, and technical reasons.

Now, the translation:

It can be illuminating to compare the strategies of the major cloud platform vendors. Instead of matching currently exposed features, let’s imagine what each major player could do to tack away from competitor strengths and toward their own. For example, Google.

Unlike Amazon Web Services or Microsoft’s forthcoming Azure cloud, Google’s overall application architecture is firewalled off from direct developer access. Yes, AppEngine can be addressed directly, as can the Google APIs. But to date there is no easy way to engage with Gmail Labs unless you are a Google engineer with 20% of your time on your hands. If you’re a Salesforce, you can invest in API connectors and leverage your own cloud. Or you can add gadgets from your iGoogle toolchest.

Marc Benioff has an uncanny sense of how to stitch together the multutude of social media and Web service resources that dominate the technology space. While many of the audience decry the notion of the enterprise applicability of these tools, Benioff and Salesforce think they’re on the way to what he calls “the next billion dollar opportunity” on top of this realtime platform.

On stage at Salesforce’s announcement of its Service Cloud, vendors like Google, Facebook, Plantronics, and even the Obama/Biden transition team are solving business problems with existing services. Salesforce spaces these announcements out over time at about one every two months. Sometimes the progress seems substantial, other times more incremental. Stitched together into a CRM service spanning Google Search, social media communities, and best practices databases, the net result delivers real value at just the time corporations are looking for leapfrog technology.

When President Obama delivers his Saturday radio address, it’s also shot on video and delivered over YouTube. When the news broadcasts excerpt from it, they use the Internet version, the one with pictures. It’s no longer a radio address; it’s a Webcast.

This week I tried to record the second season premiere of Damages, a twisty series with Glenn Close and Ted Danson among others on the FX network. No luck on the first try on Dish Network; the recording lasted 40 of the 70 minutes. A second try on Comcast bombed out after 5 minutes, but it may have been a 5 minute recap of the first season that tripped up the “New” show algorithm. Then on a hunch I checked Comcast’s On Demand repository and sure enough, there was not only the first show of the new season but the whole first season.

I saw Paul Buchheit at the Crunchies and took the opportunity to buttonhole the FriendFeed co-founder about the usual subjects: Track, track, and realtime search. Basically, track. He told me a variation of what he’s posted on FriendFeed over the holidays, that once the team was back to work they would be prioritizing the next set of work to be done. Given the times they are a’changing and all, I thought I’d suggest a few directions while we wait for Track.

Google vice president Marissa Mayer announced Google Chrome is coming out of beta in an interview with Michael Arrington at Le Web 08. The Google’s open source browser has a number of eager customers, including OEMs who can’t offer the browser until it is in full release. Chrome’s Windows client has been in beta since its roll out 3 months ago, and with the new move will likely spur bundling with Google Toolbar and Google Apps.

Chrome’s official release comes at a time when Google is accelerating efforts to redefine the browser around open Web standards while adding rich media and secure code extensions. Google’s open source Native Client project is just one possible future for the Chrome platform, where applications can run in a browser but incorporate native code modules. For example, this would allow developers to perform image processing on the local client without requiring round trips to the server.

Anything Microsoft does is looked at through a prism cut from the glass of the company that Gates built. The days of the anti-trust trial, Hailstorm, and the browser wars may seem far away, but not for the Netscapes and Novells who foundered in the face of the Windows and Office steamroller. Yet refugees of those wars have reinvented themselves in the new world of the social network, most poignantly represented by Eric Schmidt and his third-times-the-charm Google.

In the context of Google, a reinvigorated Apple, and the rise of cloud computing, Microsoft has figured out they have just as much of right to be reborn. Ray Ozzie’s tenure at the company has been a kind of stealth startup transformation applied to the entrenched duchies of the old company, and it’s bearing fruit in new language not often heard from Redmond: open, cross-platform, Mesh, Silverlight, Azure.

Salesforce and Google have extended their strategic partnership with Force.com for Google App Engine, essentially bridging the two cloud-based application development environments. App Engine applications, which are typically consumer apps, will be able to access enterprise data and services via the Force.com API.

The integration consists of a Python library, example code, and testing harness that allows App Engine apps to read and write to Force.com. As an example, Salesforce executives demoed for me a hybrid application that combined a game interface built on App Engine that allowed visitors to Harrah’s website the ability to win additional points and upgrade their experience in the actual Las Vegas casino.

Sun’s difficult position has been covered here, in business circles, and even in the land of puppets. So when Jonathan Schwartz surfaces with the launch of JavaFX 1.0, naturally the question in everyone’s mind is how exactly a client technology is going to advance Sun’s position in the marketplace as it downsizes to avoid a possible collapse.

Schwartz comes out swinging in the video embedded below, talking of Java’s strong position on desktops and what he calls the majority of mobile devices. He frames the discussion around the desire of companies to escape from the lock-in of the browser, dividing the world conceptually between Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google Chrome (presumably including Firefox and its growing share.) As he details a range of screens through which to project Java power, you can even see an iPhone on the far right though Java, like Flash, is shut out of the Apple smartphone.

The competition for the next wave of enterprise computing has heated up since Microsoft announced its Windows Azure strategy a month ago. While the jury is out in some quarters about Microsoft’s ability to actually deliver the reliability, security, and even the interoperability that is promised, the timetable has accelerated the plans of competitors and forced some to define themselves in terms of the cloud at a dangerous moment.

Sun Microsystems has been under particular pressure to realign; analysts and even Sun employees such as Tim Bray have been outspoken in their pleas for Sun’s executive team to jettison unprofitable ventures in favor of some kind of cloud strategy. CEO Jonathan Schwartz has hinted in recent months of some wood behind what Sun calls its Grid effort, and will this week roll out Sun’s JavaFX 1.0 front end technology to compete with Flash/Air and Silverlight.

JavaFX could be one of the casualties if Sun decides to pare technologies along with the 18% of its employees it’s trimming. Other cuts might include the NetBeans development environment, which has kept pace with or even bettered Eclipse in quality but not in uptake, and OpenOffice, the free Office replacement. Unfortunately for Sun, Google Docs has stolen some of the strategic thunder with an on-demand product from a company that can afford it.