Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”

Yes, these look quite a bit more like Yahoo search results.

But the most significant thing about this new look may be that it’s showing up as the default view for those seeing this test. Yes, it’s no longer as just an expandable option. Could this be the future of Google Search?

[thanks Kevin]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Taylor said that Le Meur’s request seemed “reasonable” and continued “we should do that.” “We’re not working on that. But we should be,” he continued. So there you go, done deal. Great. It would seem that soon, third parties should have access to the list filters that Facebook uses.

Here’s why this matters. With services like Seesmic (Desktop) and Brizzly importing data from both Twitter and Facebook, the social graph for those services is starting to get messy. If there were a way to merge Twitter Lists and Facebook Friend Lists, third-party services could provide a valuable new service: Easy-to-make Facebook and Twitter social graph mashups.

Granted, it seems unlikely at this point that either Twitter or Facebook will ever sync these lists with one another on their respective services. But as long as they’re willing to provide that data to third-parties, other companies should be able to do interesting things with it.

The Lists, it seems, are starting to merge.

[Photos: (cc) Kenneth Yeung - www.thelettertwo.com]

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

The panel is populated by a lot of big players in the space: Facebook, VP of Product Chris Cox, Google, Google Fellow, Amit Singhal, Seesmic, CEO Loic Le Meur, Futurity Ventures, investor/entrepreneur Edo Segal, CrowdEye, CEO Ken Moss, Microsoft, GM of FUSE Labs, Lili Cheng, Facebook, VP of Platform, Bret Taylor, MySpace, Chief Product Officer, Jason Hirschhorn, Thing Labs/Brizzly, CEO Jason Shellen, OneRiot, CEO Kimbal Musk, and Angel Investor Ron Conway. Our own Erick Schonfeld, Mike Arrington, Steve Gillmor are moderating.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

First everyone introduces themselves.

MA: So Brett and Chris were at the last CrunchUp did you sign the deal there?

BT: We met there (laughs).

ES: We’re increasingly consuming information through the streams of data. Address the noise problem, how do you do it?

CC: When we started working on Newsfeed we had a metaphor of the newspaper. It was a way to pull in a bunch of source and find what the reader found interesting. But it’s not just the newspaper, because that fully wouldn’t work. We really focused on trying to think about what you tell people first when you talk about a day or week. You focus on the important things first. It’s the right balance between a newspaper and a stream. It’s a big problem for all of us.

ES: Is your approach different from Twitter?

CC: I think it’s a problem we all have to worry about. There’s going to be more and more and more information.

ES: Ron, you can address this – how many companies you work with are on this?

RC: Most of the companies right now are dealing with the macro issues – like real-time search they’re working on the search. But there’s a huge opportunity here to be more specialized. Someone can say something like ‘we do have the best filter.’ Consumers will look for the best filtering mechanism in the next year.

ES: So what is the best filter?

RC: I think it’s UI and some deep intellectural property – and AI and semantics. Huge opportunity.

SG: Lilly you nodded about semantics.

LC: Yeah, we’re all think about time – search for ‘fort hood’ for example. There are opportunities to make it more personal.

SG: Geo will help with that right, how’s Microsoft thinking about that?

LC: First we have to see the data. We have Twitter data, but how are people going to use location data. How do you make that meaningful? Do you use maps? We’re very early.

JH: UI plays a big role in it. MySpace is concentrating on the stream through a media prism – what music and video are you looking at. We’ve had an open graph, so we have different revelency.

MA: He just threw down against Facebook. Did you say we’re better?

JH: That wasn’t my intention.

MA: Will you announce the imeem acquisition in real time.

JH: Not gonna happen. And it brings me great joy to disappoint you.

ES: You turns on status updates to Twitter. How big is that now.

JH: Yep. Twitter is growing greatly, and that relationship is doing well. I don’t know the stats, but we’re pretty big.

MA: Why won’t Facebook do that? Where’s the fear?

CC: I don’t think it’s something we won’t do. It’s something we’re looking at it, we need to do it the right way.

JH: It’s a pulse of pop-culture. It’s an additive thing.

ES: What’s the value of this stream data? Bing and Google cutting are deals, why?

AS: From Google’s perspective, these are the most exciting times for data creation. It’s exploding, it’s exciting. We’ve been thinking about since Google News and now Google Blog Search. The amount of data coming through is just amazing, and there are great things in it. And Google has expertise in filter and ranking it. Time is the biggest component. Your social graph, social circle, and geo information is all key now too. This is a new kind of information. We would love to get as much information as possible. We’re happy about the Twitter partnership. And we’re happy to get more – the more the better.

LC: I want to add to that. The social information is so interesting because it’s two-way information. It’s a dialogue, that’s really cool. I find out news about Microsoft via my Twitter feed before it’s even announced.

JH: There’s a difference too with how interesting real-time is for one user versus the collective.

JS: I agree. It seems like what’s we’re dealing with is a social finding experience. In Brizzly one of the most interesting things is the “mute” funtionality. Maybe you have to follow someone for social reasons, but you can mute him in your stream and still get his DMs, etc. All the companies here are dealing with different pieces of it.

SG: With FriendFeed you did a lot of filtering. Your thoughts?

BT: I work mostly on the Facebook Platform now. So it’s crazy to see how much it’s used by third-party sites. I now start believing in the opposite of aggregation, it’s all about using your social graph to filter now. I think this is more important than the problem of how do we mix information. If you stop thinking about it as one stream, all these products are producing way too much information, Facebook Connect can do filtering for you I think. If you want to read the comics, you read the comics, if you want to read the news, you read the news.

JS: I can’t believe we keep going back to the newspaper (laughs).

KM: Isn’t that Twitter though? You don’t value that.

BT: Sorry, I didn’t mean to say I didn’t value it, obviously I worked on that, but I think it’s hard to create the perfect experience that way. I think something like Lala has a better way of doing its own social experience, rather than just one giant stream. Realtime is a problem that every product has started to solve.

KM: I agree, but it’s the one stream that has built things like this conference. The problem is that when there are streams that aren’t open.

JH: Sometimes the social layer is a weakness too. I found my real-world friends weren’t as into music as I was. I found random people who were more interested in it. That’s why I think Twitter is important.

JS: People think of these networks in different ways too. Facebook is your real friends, Twitter you can find celebs.

JH: And that’s the reason to possibly mix them.

ES: The value of this data is greater when it becomes public?

KM: I think it’s all about the intent of the user. On Facebook you want personalized data. But aggregating data you’re not going to get it from your social circle. My mother is in your social circle. I don’t want to know about her.

LL: If a status update is public it provides more value? I disagree. Twitter isn’t growing outside of the old people like me. He’s 14, he doesn’t get it. He spends his time in Facebook. He doesn’t want it public. He wants it private. I bet there will be a lot of private growing on Twitter – that’s the key to their growth. Most people aren’t like us in the room.

ES: Why not create private groups in Seesmic?

LL: You can, throught Lists. Sadly, Facebook won’t let me at their filters through the API. We doubled the traffic of Seesmic Web in the last two weeks thanks to Lists.

AS: Shouldn’t all this information be available in one place though? Why go to all these different places? That’s the idea behind our new Social Search. You might think there’s not enough social information within your circle, but in the future there will be more information.

LL: But only Twitter is open right now.

JS: And blending isn’t the only way. If we have this discussion in a backroom it’s different than having it on stage.

AS: I don’t believe that. I think blending is important.

JS: So can we check your email inbox and see what you really think of Bing? (laughs)

LC: It’s great to consume info together, but how do you know who you’re talking to.

JH: So the mode you’re in dictates your activity? You’re different?

LC: I think that kind of works for people.

SG: The death of Office for example suggest that there will be a come to Jesus moment when the public and private streams come together. With DMs they are probably checking that before email. Facbeook has to merge those two streams.

JS: I don’t like the cobbler to touch the Salisbury steak. (laughs)

SG: I think you’re suggesting the user isn’t as smart as they are.

JS: No that’s not what I’m saying.

SG: In the age of Twitter, people have a new skill. How to talk publically.

JS: I don’t think they realize they are talking publicly though.

ES: But only Facebook can do the private and public though right? For Google it’s going to be difficult for Facebook to license this private infromation to you.

AS: Yes, these are the challenges we have to address. From a user’s perspective, if data is available to them, it should be available to them (whereever they are). We have to worry about privacy – but it’s shouldn’t be about the data here or there.

KM: Our users are smart, but we have a confusing world. We have to be careful about how we design this user experience. It’s not an easy problem.

LL: I think it’s really about learning that just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Like Paul Carr’s post the other day – what should we really be posting?

MA: But you’re like the worst example of that. Everything with you is public.

LL: You’re a very special case in my social graph. I think we shouldn’t post the location of your house on Foursquare just because we can.

Edo: The best chance to solve the problem isn’t the people on the stage, it’s the people in the audience or watching this outside. Geolocation is the next great domain. And someone not here probably won’t do these new things. We probably won’t experience this all through a search box. Twitter giving Google and Microsoft means they have to give it to everyone – or it stiffles information

ES: So was that a mistake?

Edo: I wrote that post being provacative. But I do think that. You need a jam session to get to that place, and in Twitter they aren’t jamming yet.

RC: Who knows what they’re jamming on. I hope that it’s search.

Edo: It’s important to giving this data to everyone.

MA: I think these things are evolving so quickly that it’s hard to see into the future. I would love to see Google get along with Facebook. And Facebook get along with Twitter. There are a lot of jealousness which they publicly deny, but privately confirm.

Edo: But it’s all about money, right?

MA: I don’t think that much about private and petty jealousness.

JH: I agree with Mike. MySpace wants to work with everyone, even with the press pits us against each other.

EM: We’re competitive. That’s what makes us great. This isn’t France. (laughs) Sorry Loic.

SG: The people behind of course they want to promote openness.

JH: Sure. That’s a part of our comeback. But remember we have our own users too. The Twitter thing has worked for us and them.

SG: So is Facebook and Google going to get together.

BT: I’m not in the deal side either. But we’re do believe in openness. There are apps that publish to Twitter and vice versa. The elephant in the room is privacy for the users. The data is open, not in the firehose way, but you can get access to that information. But how you make that avaiable to a search engine is much, much more complex. If there were an easy answer clearly we would do it. It wouldn’t make sense not to – but it’s a difficult problem.

SG: How long does it takes tweets coming into FriendFeed. Like 30 minutes. Is that a technical problem?

BT: We’re moving to a new API and there are some roadblocks.

SG: The blockage is an economic blockage, not a technical one.

ES: Is realtime search more for navigation?

JS: Potentially. But it’s important to note that everyone here not Facebook or Twitter we’re all reliant on them. I don’t envy their position, it’s hard to listen to all of us.

ES: So what do you guys want?

LL: I want to Friend Lists from Facebook. It’s a pain to do both Twitter and Facebook lists.

BT: Seems reasonable. We should do that. Not sure we’re working on that, but we should be.

SG: Ron what are the big issues third-parties are dealing with?

RC: I think consumers don’t realize how to use all these different services right now. Usability, filtering are really key. We invest in sentiment engines, four realtime search engines.

(Mike takes Ron’s list of investments to laughs)

RC: These new techs like geolocation and semantics, people are going to make great things with these.

MA: When you write ’stealth’ next to a company what does that mean (laughs)

SG: So Lili, Ray Ozzie brought you in to deal with some of these realtime things with Microsoft.

LC: You have to keep people who are putting in the information interested in doing that. How do you work around walls? What’s the right openness that you want?

——–Audience Q&A——-

Q: Should any of these companies look bigger trends? We have all these tools now, should we be using this stuff to help the world?

RC: I think society is radically changing behavior – and that’s why companies we’re talking about exist. It’s so radical that consumers can even keep up with it. People don’t realize some of this stuff is public.

JH: And I think what Ron is getting at could speak to what you ask. I’m not sure all companies are thinking about this, but we’re getting to a place where many of these companies are changing human behavior.

AS: People used to wait a few hours to get search results. But now everyone wants information right away from any of the search engines. Society will change again too. My kids will demand much more of my search engine though. That’s the fun of real-time.

Q: Thanks for all you guys being here. The number of people who can publish to the web has really expanded – but what about the difference between what I know versus what I’m saying? Should it be sharing about everything I know?

ES: Sergey said that – that he wants to think something and it to appear.

AS: Yes, it’s getting easier, but there is still a bottleneck. Not everyone says everything they know. It takes too much effort to share still. I think many companies will be working on that. We’re moving in the right direction, but there is still a bottleneck.

Edo: But you’re asking what we’ve done in the past. Geolocation is not about you writing something, for example.

JS: It’s also not true knowledge as well. When I worked at Blogger back in the day, people thought all this sounded like knowledge management. I think as we’ve made the text box smaller, it’s easier to express this knowledge. I’m not sure a brain probe will help.

CC: It’s difficult to get in someone’s head like we’re saying. But again, it’s surfacing the content that is critical. Like, retweet, comment, those are all great for bringing up content.

Q: What about the different terms of uses you have? How do the social networks align in that respect? A standardization of rules. Like Facebook’s new rules. What if something on Twitter goes over to Facebook that is against TOS.

BT: At a high level over the next year one big effort is simplifying terms of use. I expect simplification to be huge for all of us. We won’t all have the same ones, but it will get better. In general our terms are to stop automatted spam, not so much for spam.

SG: What are the terms of usage of Twitter data?

AS: I don’t know. Not sure about length of time.

SG: Lili?

LC: Not sure either.

Q: Will search become obsolete – will get get results based on what we actually do?

AS: Search already uses a lot of context – like our peronalized search. And the new social search changes it further. This is a good question. Search will have to transform itself to get more contextual information. Search will become much more personalized to you.

ES: What’s the most promising from an economic point of view?

RC: It was very interesting to see Dick Costolo so much promise for Twitter next year. There are a lot of things, analytics, followers, etc.

KM: Search is where there is gobs of money to be made. The problem is how do you predict for the advertisers. When Sarah Palin talked about Glenn Beck, there were no great ads for that.

JH: I think some of the things about geolocation are interesting. If you have an always on device – if you walk down the street and there is a deal.

Edo: It’s the future, we’re just using the wrong word. Ambient streams is the right word.

RC: And discovery is a huge, huge opportunity. The IP has to be perfected. In 5 years this is a multi-billion market.

JS: It’s hard to make an assumption for the best monetization right now.

BT: When social networks took off, every product on the web became social. I think all the verticals of products will start incorporating realtime elements. That will one of the biggest impacts.

Edo: Let’s come up with the right vocabulary. Talk about it on Twitter. We need a good vocabulary. If it’s not just search, what is this?

The end.

Video: Hosted by Ustream

Transcript: Provided by PLYmedia.

Come up here, find your nametags, find your name and we’ll sit down.

So this is going to be roughly a 90-minute roundtable.

And we hope to set the stage for the rest of the conference and really sort of touch upon the

Themes that we’re going to be drilling into for the rest of the conference.

Just a few points of sort of order in terms of what you expect to see today.

We’ll have this round table.

Then we’ll have another Q&A with Marc Benioff who had a very interesting announcement yesterday

At dreamforce or two days ago about a new product they’re doing.

Then we’re going to have the product demos.

Before lunch and after lunch.

We sort of broke them up.

And after lunch then we have a geo stream panel.

We have a media streams panel.

We have a conversation about how e-mail is becoming less and less relevant, with Paul Buchheit,

Started Gmail, and Rob Goldman one of our TechCrunch 50 companies and in the end we’ll wrap

It up with sort of where the rubber meets the road panel.

So is everyone sitting down here?

I think what I’ll do is just have everybody introduce themselves, I’d like everyone to give

Me the Twitter version of who you are.

Just quickly go around so that everyone knows who’s on the panel.

And then we’ll just jump right into it.

>> Jason Shellen, co-founder of Thing Labs.

And we make something called Brizzly.

And it’s open and free for everyone today.

>> Kimball Musk, CEO of OneRiot.

Real time search engine.

>> Bret Taylor, director of product and Web set Facebook for the Facebook platform former

Ly CEO of Friendfeed.

>> I’m Loic Le Meur and I’m with Seesmic, one of the clients on Twitter.

Soon more.

>> Chris Cox, head of product at Facebook.

>> Lili Cheng, I run a lab at Microsoft that looks at social experiences.

We’ve been working on a lot of the Twitter search stuff.

And also Outlook stuff.

>> Ron Conway, Angel Investor, love the real time data segment and have invested in about

20 companies since last June.

>> Amit Singhal, I’m a Google fellow I work with the Google search group, have done that for

Nine years.

>> Jason Hirschhorn, I lead product at MySpace.

>> You’re the chief.

>> It’s funny, Chris and Bret, you guys were at our last CrunchUp and that’s where you inked

The deal for the friend deal, is that right.

>> That’s the first place we Ed.

.

>> Edo Segal, Futurity Ventures, I’ve been thinking about this problem for quite some time.

>> One of the big folks of this roundtable we’re seeing all sorts of new streams of data enter

Our lives from Twitter to Facebook to MySpace, Google Wave, you know you name it.

The way we’re consuming information increasingly is through the streams of data, which has

Its benefits because you’re very in the moment.

But also you sort of become inundated with information.

So I’d like just the ability for people to keep up. So what needs to be done to make this

why don’t we start with Chris.

>> Chris: So, sure, we have this metaphor of the newspaper.

That understood from the reader’s perspective what was important and what was interesting.

And to imagine if the newspaper were comics and all the headlines were interconnected, that

Wouldn’t work.

There’s a balance to strike and the flow of everything that’s happening as it’s happening right

Now.

So we really focused on trying to think about when you tell somebody about a day or a week,

You start with certain events that are more important or more rare or more germane.

And you focus on people.

On people that are more important to you.

So if something not that

you might care.

If it happens to a stranger you might not.

Whereas if there’s a very rare or important or monolithic event, like an anniversary or a we

Dding or an engagement, that’s something that you care about even if it’s a stranger.

And so we really tried to look at aggregating context around actions, trying to understand

Who is important to the viewer.

And trying to understand which events are more or less rare.

As the basis for building a product that’s the right balance between a newspaper and a stream.

And I think those are the questions that we’re all going to be needing to come back to as more

And more information is flowing, where the attention we have in a day is not going to increase

Exponentially.

>> And do you see sort of your approach being vastly different from Twitter, from other people’s

Approach to where Twitter really is at this point is just this undifferentiated stream, isn’t

It?

>> Chris: I think it’s a problem we’re all going to need to approach.

Just because like I said, as five, 10 years go by, there’s just going to be more and more information

Flowing in real time.

And you’re not going to have 24 hours a day to sit and watch it.

I think we’re all going to be approaching this problem.

>> Ron, you can address this.

How many companies you’re investing in are trying to address this problem of filtering the

Stream?

>> Ron: I think right now most of the companies are dealing with the macro issues.

Like if it’s real time, the search, but there’s a huge opportunity yourself by making the search

More relevant.

And you’ll see the companies start to get more specialized and differentiate themselves by

Saying

these because consumers will absolutely look for the best filtering mechanism in

The next year now that they’re getting the fire host.

hose.

>> What’s the best filtering mechanism?

Is it a UI or real time search.

>> I think it’s probably a UI and some very deep intellectual property and artificial intelligence

And semantics technology that will end up producing a great filtered product.

So it’s a huge opportunity for all the start-ups out there.

>> Lili, you were nodding about the semantics, I think?

>> I think we’re still not very

we’re just beginning.

So I think the notion of searching what’s the proper time interval if I search for fort hood

Today it’s different than if I searched for it a week ago, knowing who I am and my relationship

To the thing I’m looking at.

We don’t really have it in search today.

So I just think there’s lots of opportunities to make it more personal and also just think

About time more broadly.

>> And the geo stuff is basically that’s going to really turn on the floodgate of data.

>> Right.

>> How is Microsoft going to process that?

>> You know, I think we’re going to

first we need to see the data, right?

>> Well you’re seeing the data.

>> You were telling me last night that you’re sitting there happy as clams.

[LAUGHTER]

>> I don’t mean

I mean we have the data for Twitter, but how are people really going to

Start using location data every day in their lives.

We don’t really know that, how people are going to share it.

How people want to consume it.

And then as you overlay this information on maps, how do you actually make that meaningful.

Do people want to see maps with information overlaid on it?

I just think we’re early.

And it’s going to be interesting to see how people consume it and how you make the information

Valuable to people.

>> I think UI plays a big role in it, specifically when I look at MySpace concentrating on

The stream, we’re going to look at it through a media prism and what music is going on in your

Network, and what video is going on.

And given the open nature of what we’re dealing with, where unlike some other social networks,

We sort of had an open graph where you were collecting as many friends as possible.

The more relevant stuff becomes what media are people interested in.

How do you auto play list.

How do you auto watch TV.

And some of the new services that you see like redux or Brizzly what they’re doing with media

I think are very interesting to us.

>> Did you see that?

>> He just threw down against Facebook right there.

He said you said

I don’t think you quite said this exactly.

But you said we are open.

Facebook is closed.

We’re better.

Right?

Is that what you said Chris, are you going to let him say that.

>> That’s what I said.

It wasn’t my intention but with Mike Arrington here, throw the gasoline on, baby.

>> The main question I have is are you going to announce the Imime acquisition here on stage.

>> In real time?

>> Just do it.

Just do it.

Yeah, we bought ‘em.

>> Not going to happen.

And the fact that I disappointed you brings me great, great joy.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

>> Some of those services, I think, are doing unique things.

And I think whether it be the feed or the stream, this idea of settings, when you grow your

Graph, becomes overwhelming.

And I think sort of in line decision making of I want more of this or this will play

>> You turned on status updates in MySpace to Twitter.

So I can opt in to have my MySpace status appear in Twitter.

And you’re a big portion of Twitter messages now, right?

>> I don’t know the exact number.

But obviously Twitter is growing greatly.

But we’re doing well, and I think our link short ners are doing well.

I’d like to see more relationships like that.

>> I don’t know the actual ratio.

But we’re pretty big.

>> Why won’t Facebook do that?

>> Do what?

>> Anyone from Facebook here that can answer that question?

>> We’ve got several people from Facebook who can answer that question.

>> What’s the question?

>> It was an accusation.

>> Why don’t you do proper two-way synching with Twitter.

What’s the fear?

Why are you so scared of Twitter that you won’t do that.

I guess that’s how I’ll put it.

>> I don’t think it’s something we won’t do it’s something we’re exploring and looking what’s

The right way to explore it and right way to manage it with users.

>> They did it.

They did it, the company you bought did it.

>> The way we look, I think long term about Twitter, the way we look around Twitter specifically

When we think about media, pulse of pop culture that’s a point of entry where a pulse is being

Shown.

When we want to display stuff to our users, it’s an additive thing.

I don’t look at it as being competitive.

>> What’s the value of all this streamed data?

You know, are you

Google, you just both Google and Bing cut these deals to get the stream

from

Bing did it for both Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter did it.

So explain to me what’s the value of this

>> So from Google’s perspective, these are some of the most exciting times in data creation.

In the last couple of years, the amount of data being created has just exploded.

And that’s good news for the users, right?

We have been building systems like Google news.

We started with six or seven years back.

And when my friend Krishna and I were building Google News, we were looking at how much data

Can we get crawled from the news sites in real time and how do we get it to our users within

Minutes.

>> I’m sorry?

>> How is that even happening.

>> Somebody’s taking over our conference.

>> And then when you were building Google blog search, we started dealing with RSS feeds and

How soon can we take RSS feed in and bring it back to our users filtered and ranked using ranking

Technology, which we know a little bit about how to take billions of items and give you the

Relevant ones.

And when we put all that together, we got Google news, Google blog search, but we

this was

What the new phenomena is just far outpacing everything else that we have done in the past.

And that’s what’s so exciting for me as an engineer who has worked in search for 20 years.

The amount of data that’s coming through is just amazing.

It has great things in it, and we have expertise of course indexing it and ranking it and filtering

It for our users.

There will be many components to it.

Clearly time is the biggest component.

So when we are building log search, we soon realized that Mike’s posts are great however his

Recent posts are even better.

Clearly the clarity of the poster, which we have built over years, expertise with things like

Page rank, comes in very handy.

The time factor becomes incredibly critical, but now we are seeing two added very cool features

Or signals to this is a stream of information, your social graph, your social circle, and the

Geo information.

And when you put all these together, right, Google, Google by mixing signals and getting you

The relevant information, when you put these four signals together, we are seeing a new kind

Of information emerging for our users, which is far more valuable than many other things out

There.

>> You want to get as much of the data as possible?

>> We would

we would love to get as much information that can be brought over to our users.

>> Would you like to have

>> We’re happy about our Twitter partnership.

We’re getting a lot of good data from there.

And we are very happy to get more information.

I’d love to encourage everyone to work with us.

>> Would you like to get the MySpace updates and Facebooks.

>> The more data that comes into our system, the better we can make it for our users.

>> Make a deal right now?

>> I am not on the deal side of the company.

That’s why they

>> That’s what I should have said to him about the

>> I want to add to that.

I think one of the really interesting thing about having the social information is it’s a two-way

Communication.

So it’s really easy to like look at information that you’re getting from Twitter if you see

It on the search portal.

Reach in and like you said inspect the person.

Then have a dialogue with them.

And I think that’s really cool, because even if you see a blog post it’s hard to know just

The barrier to actually reach in, touch someone, follow them.

It’s just very different.

So I think how communication and search and the two-way dialogue between what you’re consuming

And the ability to kind of participate more will be really interesting.

And then I guess it’s like you were saying, I think probably for everybody, when I look at

My Twitter feed I often find out news about Microsoft via my Twitter feed from people who don’t

Work there.

Before it actually gets announced.

Before I see it in my e-mail.

I think everybody has that kind of experience, that the quality of information coming out of

Twitter just by looking at your own friends is better than what you see through your in-box.

Sometimes, and through the Web.

If we can bring that to more people, without them actually having to follow a bunch of people

And know who’s who, it’s really powerful.

So the information is there.

>> I also think it’s important that there’s a difference between a user base and how interesting

Real time is to them, versus the net effect of real time.

So there are services out there that show you, you know, sort of a streaming amount of information.

It’s tough to take in and users aren’t coming to the site every 10 minutes to be able to see

That.

But there is a segment that that is important to, versus the news or information that gets

Up there the fastest gets retweetd and redistributed, that becomes part of what gets read first,

What gets used and listened or watched.

And it’s important to distinguish between the net effect and what user base is actually interested

In seeing on their own.

>> I agree with Jason.

It seems like what we’re still dealing with is almost like a still in a social problem stage.

So the stream data is valuable to you if you’re a company and you see your TechCrunch article

That you’ve written has 200 retweets.

But really one of the most popular things that we’ve done within Brizzly is adding that mute

Functionality.

Which really doesn’t make sense, right?

If you’re picking people in your own stream, then you go and follow that person.

But there’s actually a social problem.

The social problem is, well, I need to follow Jason for business reasons but I don’t really

Like following all his updates about his kid’s baseball team or something like that.

Maybe I can mute him but I can still have him pop above the stack and direct message me if

He needs to or get his at replies or something like that.

So there’s that personal level of relevance that is not an aggregate relevance.

So I think when you ask about value, Erick, there’s value to one person.

And then there’s that aggregate value.

So I think there’s room, obviously, all of the companies here are dealing with different pieces

Of that.

But I think the one that we’re focused on right now is how do we solve some of those smaller

Social problems.

>> Is it an either/or I don’t mute anything, or why not mute him but when other people, when

There’s more signal to his tweets, when a lot of people are retweeting his stuff or there’s

An important message, that actually pops up.

That would be

>> On Tivo if I say I don’t want to see this show I really don’t want to see the show.

>> With Friendfeed, you really delved into this issue a combination of aggregation and filtering.

So what’s your thought on what

>> I actually since I work primarily on the Facebook platform now.

So like I think I’ve seen just the incredible usage of Facebook sort of as an account system

And social graph on third-party sites.

And one thing I’ve started to believe more in is sort of I guess the opposite of aggregation.

It’s sort of bringing in social context and filtering to all the applications that you use.

Because I think it maps more to the way I like think about the world.

Like when I’m on using a product like Lala, having that like large stream of information of

What people are listening to filtered by my social graph, is actually incredibly valuable in

That context.

.

And when I’m on a news site, seeing what my friends are reading right now and having like communication

Tools to talk about that, like in real time, is incredibly valuable, almost more valuable than

The problem of how do we mix this single large stream together and filter it.

Like that’s an important problem.

And it’s an interesting problem particularly for sites like Google, where they sort of

it’s

Like a very large information problem.

But if you remove

if you stop thinking about it as one stream and have all these products

Producing more information than has ever been produced in the history of man kind and how do

You actually provide value to your users as a creator of that product, I think that I’m more

And more in the belief of like products like Facebook Connect offering the ability for these

Products to provide like social context and filtering, within specific context of, say, watching

Television, listening to music.

Reading news.

So you kind of go to a product to perform a particular action.

Sort of goes back to what Chris was saying.

Like when you’re reading a newspaper.

You don’t have like a mix of comics and news and like editorial.

They’re kind of split up because you kind of, if you wanted to read the comics you read the

Comics, if you want to read the news you read the news.

More and more as the space matures I think we’ll see more of that.

Like more people focusing on particular types of use cases applying filtering

>> But potentially, Bret, if there was a newspaper, and I can’t believe we keep referring

To newspaper as a paradigm that we want to actually replicate in the future.

If there was that perfect thing for you, maybe it would have, like, hey, here’s comics, a little

Bit of this and that.

>> Doesn’t Twitter do that.

That’s what’s great about Twitter.

You actually get it in

you get it in a stream that is the comics.

It’s the cartoons.

>> I didn’t mean to say it didn’t have value.

Obviously I worked on a product that did exactly this for quite a while.

I think it’s actually

I think part of what I’m saying it’s

we’re very focused on if we

Had every piece of information about every single person you know how do we filter it, it’s

Kind of like we created the problem that we’re solving, too.

And it’s entirely possible that, you know, that it’s very hard to create the perfect music

Experience, you know, within a product like that.

But I have a feeling in a product like Lala has a much better chance of creating a perfect

Sort of social music experience, perfect real time music experience.

And so I’m not saying these products aren’t important or Friendfeed isn’t important by any

Means, obviously.

But I do think that filtering applies to like, it doesn’t just mean there’s one stream and

We’re all filtering the same stream.

In lots of different contexts and lots of different products, real time is the problem that

Like every product has begun to solve.

And I think it’s very important that like we consider like the platforms that will help these

Products solve those problems.

>> I agree with that.

But so the filtering

so the filtering, the one stream that’s common or the open streams,

I think it’s what’s grown this entire conference.

The fact we’re all here and our companies, is that there’s some amazing bets made that made

This data available and new things like lists and locations.

And others that authority that are going to just let us filter the stream in amazingly different

Ways and tailor it to our products and user scenarios.

But I think sort of the danger maybe, is if there are streams that are pockets of information

That aren’t going to be open, then I’m not sure what that’s going to do to the usefulness of

Those data.

>> I’d also say that sometimes the social layer is a weakness.

If I take myself.

I remember when I first got onto the Internet, one of the things I was looking for was my real

World friends were not as deeply into music in a way that I was.

And this is way back where you’d post on Use Net and ask questions about stuff.

I found other people I did not know or had access to other interests.

And if you just look at the stream through a social layer, how do you also get stuff that your

Friends aren’t interested in and I think that’s a very sort of important thing.

That’s why I think exchanges like Twitter and other places in terms of general trends are still

Very important.

>> It’s also the other piece that you mentioned there that is important is that people think

Of these networks in different ways.

Facebook is also thought of as, oh, that’s where my high school friends are.

My friends, real friends maybe are.

Twitter is often thought of is hey I can subscribe to ashton Kutcher or my friend from industry.

And I think MySpace is accused of this as well the different kinds of networks.

So I agree that it is a weakness.

But do they have a certain predilection, and whatever comes next.

Is that going to have some certain bent that’s around business or something else.

>> And thus the reason to possibly mix them.

>> What are you going to

>> I don’t know about possibly mixing them.

>> You’re saying that the value of this data is, becomes greater once the data becomes public.

Which they can make it more valuable definitely for search engines and definitely for outside

Players.

I wonder whether it becomes more valuable to Facebook and Twitter as well.

You guys have it so you don’t care but if it adds value to more outside developers isn’t it

More valuable to you?

>> I think it depends on the intent of the user.

If you’re on Facebook intent is to keep up with your friends, read the sports, comics, on at

Twitter so forth that’s where you want personalized data.

But the value of aggregating data is when you actually want to find out what’s going on.

In your social circle.

My mother’s in my social circle.

I don’t want to know what’s going on with my mother but I want to know what’s going on with

Everyone else in this room.

You’re not in my social circle.

>> Your mom just called.

>> You’re saying something very interesting that we take a statement that if a status is public

Has more valuable.

That’s what you said.

Actually very much disagree with that.

Because I watch that Twitter is not growing outside of the what my son calls the old people

Like me.

He’s 14 years old and he doesn’t get Twitter at all.

And I love Twitter myself.

But he spends his time on Facebook.

And I try to talk to him and understand why is that.

And he sees no value in taking anything public.

What he wants is really the stream of his friends in private and I think what’s really going

To be interesting is how private evolves compared to public.

The explanations why Twitter is not growing so fast anymore as Dick said this morning, because

It doesn’t have a private growth that Facebook has.

And many people actually are not like most of us in the room.

We link to public and search and expose yourself.

>> Why can’t you create private groups in Seesmic.

>> You can, actually.

You have use lease, you don’t have to take them public.

But my point is, unfortunately Facebook doesn’t let me have Facebook use least.

You don’t call them use least but friend list and the API level.

So you can’t filter Facebook stream on Seesmic.

Either on the Web or on the top yet unless there’s an announcement that you would be happy

To integrate it.

>> But instead of worrying about public and private, shouldn’t all the relevant information

Be at your fingertips whenever you need it, public, private, semi private.

Isn’t that the right solution for users?

All users out there?

That you don’t have to worry about, oh, my friends don’t know enough about music.

The world does.

Why should you think about where do I go to find out those people?

Shouldn’t they all be available in one place?

>> But in this case MySpace.

>> The public and the private, semi private results.

So a small example of that is social search experiment that we’ve launched recently where the

View of your social circle is of available to you on the topic you are interested in, along

Side the best public information out there.

Now, right now that stream is built up of public information because of access control and

So on and so forth.

But in an ideal world, why should I have to think whether my friends know or don’t know about

Schnauzers, the kind of dog I have or the world knows about it.

I should be able to get the best information and information relevant to me.

Personally relevant to me.

>> So if your friends have mentioned something about that.

So the likelihood of that is very low, actually.

>> I’ve been playing with that search.

>> The results.

>> You just described Facebook search.

Actually.

>> I was upgrading my iPhone, and I didn’t even realize after Google’s social search launch

And I typed in 3 GS my friend Matt had three GS you may not think enough information is not

Available but access controls related to the things do make it harder, don’t get me wrong.

But as the systems become more and more open, the future is going to be towards everyone not

Thinking about where the information goes.

They need relevant information at their fingertips and they shouldn’t be thinking about it.

>> The problem social graph is not open.

It’s only on Twitter.

>> As of right now you’re right that

>> And blending is not the only way, though.

I think, I mean, this would be a very different discussion if we just went back in the waiting

Room area and had this discussion about real time streams.

We’re speaking into a different area.

It’s not speaking, knowing that it’s going to be published publicly, and I think when you blend

Those things, you sort of degrade the experience, potentially.

So right now in Brizzly

>> I don’t believe that.

>> Actually

>> When you blend relevant information for me, if it’s from my friends, right, Matt’s iPhone

3 GS review might not be the best piece of review out there.

It should not be shown to general users out there.

>> So can we check your Gmail in-box and see what you really think of Bing.

I think what you say publicly and what you say privately are two different things.

You can’t argue that every place is the same place.

>> We’re going to let you have the Schnauzer space.

It’s all yours.

>> What’s interesting you take something like Facebook they haven’t blended your in-box with

Facebook with your feed.

It’s really important.

It’s not just a consumption experience it’s an information experience.

I need to know who my audience is.

And some issues it’s a UII make this error in Twitter all the time I’m SMSing I reply and I

Forget to D somebody and it’s kind of an issue.

So as more and more sensitive information gets blended together, it’s great to consume it all

Together but then how do you let people know who they’re actually talking to.

>> Meaning the mode you’re in dictates your activity?

>> What?

>> Meaning the mode that you’re in would dictate your activity.

So you may do things differently in e-mail and IM versus

>> I think it’s an interesting decision that in Facebook they’re separate.

I think actually people

it’s kind of a weird thing, right, that your e-mail is in one page

And you have comments in the wall on another page.

But there’s a reason why that probably works for people, because you want to know who your

Audience is.

You want to know the communication.

>> The death of Office, for example, suggests that there’s going to be a come to Jesus moment

When these two types of streams, public and private, from the user perspective, come together.

Because ever since Twitter direct messages started to become visible, there was a certain flight

To direct message.

It’s the easiest way.

If you have a connection to be able to talk to someone.

Because they are probably checking their Twitter feed before they’re checking their e-mail.

So this is

this is a collision that is going to

what Facebook is doing right now, they’re

Going to have to figure out, in my opinion, how to merge those two streams.

So it may be an interesting tactic that they’re using right now, but I don’t think it’s going

To sustain itself.

I’m sure you don’t agree with that, Jason.

>> Which piece of that don’t I agree with?

>> That these things are going to be commingled as opposed to being separate with

>> I don’t like the, in the Swanson’s TV dinner for the Cobbler to touch the Salisbury stake

steak either.

I like them separate.

I guess they’re different social modes you’re in as a human being, let alone those facets on

The Web.

And I think those need to mirror each other.

There’s not one friend of mine who would say the same thing on Facebook who would say the same

Thing on Twitter without knowing up front, okay, I’m synching this from Twitter to Facebook.

>> I think you’re suggesting that the user is not as smart as they really are.

>> That’s not at all what I’m suggesting, Steve.

>> I would think that you wouldn’t agree with me, but that doesn’t mean that that’s

people

In the age of Twitter have learned a new skill, which is how to talk publicly.

>> I don’t think most of them know that they’re talking publicly, actually.

And I don’t know that it really matters in aggregate.

So for most people, I think if you look at the amount of people that they’re subscribed to

And the number of people who subscribe to them, is very low.

And that’s fine.

And that’s probably good for their social group.

But I don’t know that they know that it’s really public and out there all the time.

I’m not saying they’re not smart.

The comment economy and you had all these news articles about look at these kids, they’re posting

Photos of wild parties.

They didn’t know.

>> But this whole issue of mingling

your point about mingling what your private social

Group is saying versus the public statements, that in fact is kind of the direction that Facebook

Is going, and only they can do it really because they have the private and the public right

Now.

When you do search, you get your friends results.

But once you have enough, everyone opt-ins, you can easily surface stuff from everyone on Facebook,

Right?

The issue for Google is that it’s going to be difficult for Facebook to license that private

Information to you.

I mean, only searchable information really if you guys do a deal is going to be the everyone

Stuff.

So there’s

you’re at a

to the extent that the Facebook data is interesting.

>> These are indeed going to be the challenges that we, as we the thought leaders in this

And, yes, we have to respect privacy, because it’s incredibly important that no private information

Be linked to anyone else.

But for me, my private information should be available, and I shouldn’t have to worry about

Whether this is here or sitting there.

>> So one of the biggest problems we face here is our users aren’t

they are smart.

But we’re starting to have a confusing world here, right?

Just on Facebook, how many people who aren’t sort of expert Facebook users are typing in the

Wrong box and posting to something embarrassing on a wall that they meant to be private.

Or

and if we start, if we start adding the now some data is public-public versus just public

To your friends, versus private, to a single person, we’re going to

we have to be really

Careful about how we design this user experience.

And today it’s simple, right?

Twitter, it’s open to everyone.

And Facebook, it’s my friends who I’ve shaken hands with and we’re friends.

And I think that we’re going to have to get to this world where the information is available

So everyone can take advantage of it and users can get good tools.

But it’s not an easy problem.

>> I think it’s

I’m sorry.

I think it’s really about learning that it’s not because we have those tools available that

We should do everything we want with them so it is if you look at the Paul Carr’s post about

The shootings in Texas 10 days ago, where he actually posted this video of someone dying, and

That’s on the video.

It’s like I have a camera on your face, and like I think Paul wrote: Watch me watch you.

And it’s like

>> From

>> I’m sorry?

My point is we shouldn’t post those things.

The guy who was the military started Twittering about the events shouldn’t have done it this

Way, not because he could not do it, we can send it to Facebook, to MySpace and Twitter, but

It’s more about learning the basic effects like if I go in your house

>> The worst example of the Paul Carr article.

There’s no barrier between your private and public lives that I can see.

And anything you hear or do privately, it seems like you’re perfectly willing to push that

Out publicly.

Because that is sort of what you do.

I’m not judging you on that, at least here.

>> If I go to your house, I’m not going to

>> You do that all the time.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Luic I’m having a bad day.

Heather and I got in a fight.

She’s mad at me the page is down.

I see a Twitter.

Erick’s bummed because Heather yelled at him.

And I don’t think in your brain you see any difference.

>> You’re a very special case in my social

[LAUGHTER]

>> But, yeah, I think we have to think about not going to your house and posting the location

Of your house on Foursquare.

I think it’s not something we should do.

It’s not that I can’t do it.

I shouldn’t do it.

>> You wanted to make a point.

>> I think going back to the original question and the context of the panel, it’s very unique

To have all of these people together and I want to just shine a light on a few areas that we

I think the greatest chance to solving the problem is actually not the people on the stage.

It’s the people in the audience and watching us at home in terms of the ability to actually

Break through on some of these issues.

So because innovation tends to happen elsewhere and it happens outside big companies.

It’s very important that the bigger companies are very cognizant to that to the extent there

Remains an openness that kind of Twitter really started.

And Facebook is moving in the direction.

And geo location is the next great domain.

Because the reality is that we have a lot of talented people that are approaching different

Slices of the experience, but the real break through, where the real future is of this, we’re

Actually not even

we don’t even know what questions to ask at this point in terms of how

It’s going to be consumed, because we’re kind of assuming it’s going to be consumed in the

Same way, to your point, about where we are now in a search box.

.

But it’s probably not going to be that way at all.

It’s going to be much more of an ambient experience.

So my first point is in the day when Twitter gives their feed to Microsoft and Google, it’s

Probably the day or soon after where everybody has access to that feed or otherwise it really

Does become a point in history where it’s actually stifle ling innovation.

So that’s one point.

And I think if Twitter’s point on that is we can’t support it because we can barely keep our

Servers up, then guess what you just gave your data to someone that actually knows how to do

That

>> You think it was a mistake to do the deal with Google?

>> I wrote that post about it being a mistake with full knowledge that it’s happening.

And I was being provocative, and I think the point for me right now is that it goes back to

What I was just saying about innovation.

It’s kind of role playing.

If you and your spouse

there are certain things she does, certain things I do.

And we kind of fall into place.

If Twitter has basically outsourced its search problem to the best minds in the world in Google

Or Microsoft to do that, they’re not as focused on that list of 20 things that they’re doing.

And that really is a shame, because I think the search and discovery problem is one where you

Need that kind of passion and that

it’s kind of like jazz.

And the right people to have that jam session is the people in the Twitter building.

And right now they’re not jamming on that.

They’re jamming about on boarding.

And that takes them

>> Who knows what they’re jamming on.

>> Some of them are.

>> You do.

>> Do you know what they’re jamming on.

>> I absolutely don’t.

But I hope they are jamming on search.

>> I would argue they’re not.

Or not as much as they would have.

>> I argue that I hope they are.

>> I argue the same thing.

>> That was my whole point.

>> In fairness Dick said on boarding search and discovery.

So it looks like they’re jamming.

>> That was my concern, just about that.

Rather than

but I think the point that happens really important to give that level of access

To the people in the audience and all those wise developers.

Because it’s a question of talent but it’s also a statistical question of you don’t know what

Sticks and you’ve got to have as many experiments as possible.

That can’t happen without transparency and data throughout all silos it’s not just at which

Twitter and Facebook but it’s all locations we’re seeing that trend it’s critical for all companies

>> The thing that bothered.

I tried to pick a fight with Erick, but he didn’t bite.

I think these things are evolving so quickly it’s hard to see into the future.

I think companies have visions of where it’s going.

It’s so fascinating to me to see how things evolve.

What I’d really like to see is Google get along with Facebook so that we can have access to

That data as well, as Twitter data.

And not just have look to bing for that.

And I’d like to see Facebook get along with Twitter and have full data integration.

>> Throw in world peace, Michael.

>> I’d like to have world peace in our world.

And there’s a lot of jealousy and sort of anger and dislike of these companies between each

Other, which they public deny, but privately confirm.

I would just really like to see some of us move beyond that so that we can have maybe faster.

>> Your problem is a business problem.

It’s a question of where the money is coming from.

It’s the whole

I mean this whole discussion and the filter and the importance of at which

Twitter participating or not, all has to do with the notion of intent and where people are

Spending.

Sort of who is growing faster.

Facebook is mad at Twitter because they grew so fast they got so much press attention.

And Google this.

Personally that’s what I think.

Because all these companies are doing pretty well financially.

>> I think there’s that presumption but I’ll throw out my opinion.

As a user we want to be open and work with people.

I think the press or anyone else that pits us against each other might have happened here.

I see a world where we work with Facebook, we work with Twitter and any other great technology

Where audiences are gathering, you know, it can lend value.

>> I thought we lived in America.

>> Sounds like we all should be in France.

I’m sorry.

But we’re a competitive culture.

That’s what makes us great.

The fact that Facebook and Twitter, MySpace compete

[LAUGHTER]

>> Sorry.

>> He was trying to save this for the Web.

>> We actually will be in France in a couple of weeks.

>> The reality, the nature of the Internet is open.

It’s only a matter of time before these systems.

>> But you say that.

>> For me, listen I’ll say it right now.

It’s certainly a part of MySpace’s come back, but there’s also still 100 million people that

Are unique to us, and we have good experiences for them.

But I also think that Twitter showed that all of a sudden it made our stream more vibrant.

And it was a good thing.

It worked for Twitter and it worked for us.

It’s not always I think in that case a zero sum game.

>> Is Facebook and Google are you guys going to get together?

>> Mike wants an announcement.

>> I just want to say like I’m not on the deal side as well.

I can pull that card as well.

I want to say we’re committed to openness.

I think the challenge that Ken alluded to earlier is that there are like different privacy

Controls on all these different networks.

So we did have the ability to sort of like publish your Facebook status updates directly to

Twitter.

There’s lots of applications that do the other directions.

Like I think most people who have that direct need can accomplish it pretty easily right now.

I know my account is set up that way.

For example, and I think most people’s here are.

I think there’s a genuine challenge that doesn’t apply to most people at this table because

We tend to use these services sort of as a broadcast mechanism that do apply to a lot of users

Like whether or not they have the need to publish things from one system and automatically

Have it go to another system.

The implications of that decision aren’t necessarily obvious to a lot of users.

So I think a lot of the elephant in the room really here is privacy for network particular

Ly like Facebook where there’s a lot of private information being shared.

There’s a lot of like implicit and explicit contexts in which that information is shared.

So the data is very open.

Not like in the sort of fire hose way but a user if you use something like Facebook Connect

You can get access to that user’s stream and like Seesmic and Brizzly does, that information,

Private and public, is available.

The question of like how do you like make that available on the search engine is a much more

Complex problem.

And so I think that we’re

I honestly don’t know like the answer.

There’s no reason like openness benefits Facebook at this point.

There’s so much innovation on our platform.

That like it would be really, really like strategically bad for us to do anything that would

stifle that vairgs.

But I think it’s a genuinely difficult problem.

>> Before we get back to the privacy discussion, how long is the round trip right now incoming

From tweets to Friendfeed?

>> That’s a little longer right now.

>> Like 30 minutes right now, right?

>> Yeah.

>> Is that a technical problem?

I don’t think so.

>> We are supposed to

we’re transitioning to a new real time API that Twitter is providing,

And there’s some roadblocks.

But I don’t know all the details.

>> The roadblocks, not to beat up on Twitter or people who are investing in Twitter, but the

Fact is that what the blockage to openness is an economic blockage.

It’s not a technical one.

So when we talk about search, that’s after this war is fought and decided.

>> Probably most convenient figure leaf on that.

And it’s correct.

I think the big war at the end of the day where do these users go to to start their discovery

Process?

If it’s Google, then that creates the mapping to the intent which is where most of the money

Is, which is not necessarily where Facebook’s head is.

Where it is in the future.

>> For that experience of like you said discovery, you don’t necessarily start with Google

For discovery.

You go to Google to find an answer for something.

>> The question is real time search more navigation, becoming a navigation.

>> Potentially, but to Steve Gillmor’s point.

I would like to talk to the technical for a moment.

Anyone who is not a Facebook or Twitter at the table we’re reliant on something that’s going

On at a network that we don’t control.

And as Luic mentioned to Chris we don’t have access to Facebook, for instance, and we don’t

Have access to lots of things we’d like to.

For that developer community to grow and to continue, both Twitter and Facebook are going to

Have to do a lot of listening.

I don’t envy the position.

Seems like a difficult one to need to listen to developers like me hammer on you to say, hey,

Can you add this.

>> What’s your wish list?

>> Social graph would be my number one.

I would like to be

I think it’s awful that.

>> What’s that mean?

>> The friends list.

And like being able to filter my friends from Facebook like we can do it now with list and

Access

like I think it’s the problem of rebuilding your friends list in both Twitter and

Facebook is kind of painful for our users.

We can see that.

And then filter them.

Why would I fill them once on Twitter for a list and vice versa.

>> Seems pretty reasonable.

>> Good. When do I get it?

>> I don’t think we’re actively working on it.

But we should be.

So I’ll get back to you.

It seems very reasonable.

Most of these things, as you all know, developing products yourselves, come down to sort of

More things to do than people to do them.

But if something becomes like a big demand and gets on our radar.

>> Ron, in your portfolio, do you

>> Just a second.

If people have questions come up to the mic.

We’ll call on you.

>> Ron, in your portfolio, real time companies, what do you think are the number

one two

, two and three issues that third party developers are dealing with?

>> Well, I think a lot of them are trying to realize and define what is the best use case

For these products.

And how they fit into the ecosystem.

>> That’s one.

>> You have consumers who don’t really realize how to use all these services, and where all

These services fit in.

And therein lies the massive opportunity for start-up innovation.

But it’s usability.

It’s filtering, which is where we started this.

Filtering all this massive amount of information.

And the interesting thing is many companies exist today we’re an investor in several sentiment

Engines.

We’re an investor in four real time search engines.

We’re investors in real time

>> Is that the list of all your investments right there?

>> It’s a smattering of real time.

There’s behavioral targeting companies.

The point I’m going to make is the technology exists independently.

[LAUGHTER]

>> That’s investigative journalism right there.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Thank God I don’t bring anything confidential to these conferences anymore.

[LAUGHTER]

Because last June, at this conference

there was something confidential.

So I don’t bring

>> Some of these haven’t been announced.

>> So what I was going to say, you have all these independent technologies that have been

Developed.

And the innovation is going to be now that all

now all these technologies are going to be

Integrated together to give the user an even better experience.

Semantics.

>> I feel Mike’s leg shaking.

>> You’ve got geo location.

Companies are going to take these independent technologies and integrate them to make a fabulous

Experience for the consumer.

>> Semantics geo location, and.

>> Behavioral targeting.

>> Okay.

>> And intent.

>> Okay.

>> I think Mike has a question for you.

>> Just when you write stealth next to the company, is that

>> Wait.

>> Does that mean

>> Don’t read it on stage.

>> That means I shouldn’t read it on stage.

>> I’ll give this back.

>> Lili.

Lili, you basically Ray Ozzie, brought you on top of an umbrella of research projects.

Outlook actually rubber meeting road types of things.

From your perspective, as sort of the captain of the Microsoft real time effort, what are the

Top three priorities that you see in terms of the issues that we’ve been discussing.

>> I think one thing to remember is you have to keep the people who are inputting the information

Motivated and interested to continue to do that in an ongoing way.

So maybe what we’re interested in from a search perspective is really different than what the

Teenager just tweeting to their friends or who happen to take a picture of some event cares

About.

So I think it’s really important to remember both the consumption side, from the real time

Search side.

Also it’s just a communication tool for most people.

And the fact that we can kind of get this feed and use it for other purposes is really a byproduct

But we shouldn’t forget that for most people it’s actually a way to talk to people that they

Care about.

So I just think it’s

it’s important to focus on both sides.

>> And the impact on the company?

The impact on Microsoft.

I alluded to the disruption that’s going to occur around Office as it moves to a service.

>> If you think of enterprise in general, so many enterprises are around the wall.

Around the enterprise.

And containing the information.

And so much information actually exists outside the wall.

So I think the question is like how do you manipulate that boundary?

How do people feel safe because people aren’t always comfortable with whatever paper is in

Front of them get dragged off around in public.

There’s a private boundary people have, but how do you be more open.

Like what’s the right openness you want.

Obviously it’s really easy to bring all the information in so you can seam it all together

But what goes out?

>> Questions from the audience?

>> Question: I’m bartoss Slovic.

I’m curious, a lot of what you’re talking about involves current human psychology, the way

any of the companies take a broader stance in the greater time line of history, take a look

At societal problems.

Take a look at sort of global trends that have occurred in time, I mean all things being equal,

Human beings are still human beings.

We’ve evolved slightly throughout the centuries.

But here we are now with these tremendous tools and communicating with one another in real

Time.

Are any of your companies or organizations actually facilitating like I guess steps towards

Addressing some of the global trends that have occurred throughout the ages?

>> Well, I just want to make a general comment.

You said that society is slowly changing.

I think society is radically changing behavior which is created the market that most of our

Companies represent.

On Facebook, even in their private pages, are willing to disclose so much.

So the evolution that’s happening is posting on Twitter, that it really is public.

It’s been alluded a lot here.

Kids on Facebook, when Facebook photos started, didn’t realize that those pictures would be

Public to all their friends.

So it’s not an evolution.

It’s a radical, radical change that we need to help the consumers cope with.

>> I think having that discussion that Ron alludes to is part of thinking about what the societal

Impact can be.

I don’t know if you’re asking if one of our sites or businesses are trying to get behind a

Cause.

But the fact that we’re platforms to allow people to communicate and share ideas is a major

Upside, but also a downside, as you point out.

And I think the fact that some of us think prudently is because we’re worried about the implications.

And I think it’s not that our users are stupid.

I think it’s they sometimes, you know, in the thick of things, in using all sorts of new functionalities

And technologies that come out of a daily basis they actually don’t think of the implications

What can happen to themselves.

>> Right.

>> I guess what I was alluding to, as you reveal information in real time, you can influence

Your decisions in real time and you can effectively close the loop on how we choose to create

Our reality in real time.

>> I’ll look at it from a slightly less lofty position.

But certainly as I have been looking at real time.

I mean, and I look at it from a programmatic nature, our social network also has broadcast

Mechanisms and areas where people come to be programmed, too.

And the old method, the portal method, was you put something up on a page.

You leave it there for a couple of days.

But we’re going to start to make programming decisions in real time so that the information

That you’re seeing around a television show and movie or piece of music or a social cause is

Hopefully more likely what you’re interested in.

And that is going to be an evolution so that just like a social network, your experience may

Be very different than somebody else’s experience on a social network.

Your programming experience should also not be a one-to-many but also with very specific one

That is driven by real time decisions.

>> Want to address that then we’ll go to questions.

>> I’ve observed in my lifetime as an engineer on search.

People used to wait a few hours to get information sometimes a few days.

I was a search engineer back then.

There was not that much of an Internet.

As time progressed and the creation of evolution happened on the Internet.

People expect to get information right away.

In any of the search engines.

So we made people’s thinking much faster.

Human beings are more efficient today than

however, the search engines a few years back

Still gave you information that was layered.

And what people are going to expect in the coming year is getting information which was produced

Seconds back to you when it’s relevant to you.

And society is

it’s going to change again.

I can’t predict how.

But I’m going to tell you my kids are going to demand more of my search engine than I do of

My own search engine because they will say, oh, come on how can this not be found by me two

Seconds after it was produced.

So societies will change.

Human beings will become even more efficient, and that’s the fun part of being in this business

Is that our great intelligent users collectively make the world better by developing interests,

Doing what they want to do and the time to that has been short circuited.

That’s the fun of real time.

>> Question: First thing I want to say is thanks to the people for being here.

This is a lively discussion.

Thanks for that.

I think the big trend over the past five years, I don’t think anybody will argue, is what’s

really happened is the number of people able to publish the Web is really expanded, whether

It be in context of a blog, social network, Twitter, real time I sort of is I guess the recent

Step in that direction.

So my question for you all, is before we talk about the problem of how do I filter a stream,

How do I index a stream, I want an assumption here that what is published to the Web, we’re

Satisfied with that.

A different way to ask the question is that there’s a big difference in the quantity and quality

Of what I know versus what I’m saying.

And what you’re publishing to the Web is this much.

And what we’re talking about is indexing and organizing and getting access to this much data.

And so I’m curious, is what we’re all talking about today a step towards accessing and sharing

What we actually know?

Or does it filter it?

Whatever.

>> He wishes he could think something and it will appear on the Web.

>> What you’re alluding to is a very, very reasonable point with Web pages moving on to blogs.

Moving on to tweets, it’s been easier and easier for human beings to create information, communicate

What they know.

However, that is still a bottleneck, and you’re really picking on the bottleneck that experts

Who know

Ron is not telling all about his investments, what we should invest in.

So experts who know, you know, experts who know and they would like to share still the amount

Of effort it takes to get all your knowledge available in the form to the world is more and

I think many companies will be working in that direction, and I think as that cycle becomes

Easier for people to [indiscernible] to produce.

I think from Web pages to blog posts to tweets we’re moving in the right direction.

But there’s still a bottleneck.

>> It’s knowing what question to ask.

You’re asking the question through the prism of what we’ve done in the past.

So the on boarding of a tremendous amount of signal from location applications is not about

You writing something.

And it’s immensely important for the future of solving this problem.

.

And there will be other forms like that which are not about someone typing in a thought or

A piece of knowledge.

It’s about our action in the world.

That’s what the real time Web is about.

It’s about the consciousness.

It’s what we’re doing

>> It’s not necessarily knowledge, though.

Not true knowledge as well.

So I worked at blogger.Com back starting in 2000.

And what we saw when we would talk to companies about blogging, even in enterprises or small

Businesses, they would say that sounds a lot like knowledge management.

And it’s very simple.

All you need to do is sign up all your employees and get them to put all their content in everything

They have in their head in this form categorize it.

See whether or not their manager can see it.

If the rest of the company can see it.

They talk to their director, and we were like that sounds terrible.

Why not just use a blog.

It’s a little white text area.

You type in there and some stuff happens.

So I think as we’ve made the text box smaller, it’s become even easier to express that knowledge.

So I think I’d have to agree with Amit that there’s

it’s becoming easier for that to happen.

I don’t know that some sort of like brain probe is going to help us like get true knowledge.

But the easier transmission, the, making the creation tool is easier is going to help make

That repository larger. I think it’s difficult to get inside someone’s head as we’re talking

About it.

But one part of the product that we all have a lot more control over is surfacing the content

That is meaningful.

And doing that in a way, if you look at Facebook and Twitter and Friendfeed, the real lightweight

Feedback features whether it’s like or retweet or comment, if those are lightweight and 46less,

I think we end up with a ecosystem that’s able to bubble up when something comes out of the

Mouth that’s valuable.

And that as builders of these mediums, we really need to focus on that.

It’s something we have more direct control over than how do we get you to say something that

Is intelligent.

>> Go to the next question right here.

>> Hi.

My name is Adam Bolt with Goso.

I’m currently working with most of your APIs.

And today one of the things that I wanted to ask you, I hear you speaking a lot about privacy.

And be resolved at a user level.

One of the challenges that we’re seeing is the different terms of uses that you have.

For example, Facebook just changed a promotion guidelines.

How do you see all of the large social networks aligning themselves in that respect?

>> Sort of a standardization of rules?

>> Exactly.

Just because even like recently with Facebook’s new update, you know, with the stream and everything,

You know, what if somebody Twitters on the same page and someone does a promotion on at which

Twitter that goes over

that gets published on Facebook, it just seems like it’s a big challenge

To align everybody’s terms of use.

>> Would you like to address that?

Terms of use around our platform.

To say right now, but we’re having tons of discussions about that.

And as these platforms become more and more open, I expect that will be the trajectory.

I doubt they’ll all be like the same terms.

But I think simplification is strategically the right direction.

For everyone on stage.

Because any barrier you put in place to develop or building on your platform is bad.

Regarding

I’m not sure specifically what

I’m happy after this to talk to you about specific

Terms.

In general, our platform, the terms we put in place are about preventing automated spam mechanisms,

Not something that a user does.

A user has control over their own stream.

Whether or not it comes into a client or not.

>> I was talking specifically about the promotional guidelines you just announced.

>> Probably I imagine unless it’s interesting, I can chat with you afterwards.

>> Let me ask you, you probably won’t be able to answer this, but what are the terms of usage

Of Twitter data?

>> I really don’t know, as I said.

>> Do you happen to have any idea whether you can retain that data for any length of time?

>> I don’t know the details.

>> Lili?

>> I actually don’t know the details either.

So I’m sure I can find

>> I’m sure, people who

>> Great.

>> So one more question over here.

>> Question: I’m Kelly.

I was wondering, do you think that search will become sort of obsolete in the sense that we’ll

Get results as users produced based on what we actively do?

And if this is the case, I know it’s a sharing of information based on your network of friends

Versus public information.

So won’t this information need to be integrated in terms of producing those search results?

>> Isn’t Google’s host on that?

>> Search already uses a lot of context.

Google’s search if you have signed on is free and uses a lot of context based on what you’ve

Done in the past.

Our social search experiment to enhance your search experience, you’re asking a very good question.

What we observe out there, there’s so much information being produced, that I would say search

Uldn’t say search will become obsolete but it has to incorporate itself to incorporate much

More information that would be available to search engines.

So the need to find relevant information would still be there because there’s so much happening

You don’t want to know about everything all the time.

There’s specific things that you need to know now.

Or 10 minutes from now.

So search would incorporate all the contextual and personal signals and search would become

Much more personalized.

With things like that my friends talk about this I need to know about this.

If I’m interested in it.

Much more geo specific search context, much more social specific search context.

And much more real time search context.

Coming together to provide search of tomorrow which are we are all working towards in our business.

>> We have about

one thing we haven’t touched upon here.

How are we going to make money off the stream?

>> We’re going to talk about this later on in the day.

But I want to get some ideas up here.

Ron, I think last time you threw out a number that the real time industry is going to be worth

$5 billion within a few years.

I don’t know whether you were talking about evaluation or revenues.

But what you see monetization to start to be turned on.

Obviously you can talk about search, you know, search advertising, but even searchtizing traditional

Search advertising don’t work with real world search because it’s hard to predict what people

Are going to be searching, there’s problems with that.

There’s in-stream promotions and advertising.

Give me a sense of where do you see the most promising areas from an economic point of view.

>> It was very encouraging this morning to hear Dick Costolo say that in 2010 sometime that

.

Actually cheating.

I’m looking at the list I cited.

That I cited last June.

Analytics.

Incentives.

You know, the acquisition of followers.

Is going to be worth something.

People will have to figure out how to monetize that.

>> Those are all great.

I think there will be a lot of money to be made.

But search there are just gobs of money to be made.

The reason is because you get their intent.

You get their intent at a time they want something.

And I think Erick said the biggest problem with real time search is how do you predict the

Search flow.

Not from the user’s perspective.

You probably get the information back to the user.

But how do you predict for the advertiser?

Sarah Palin came out yesterday with all this stuff, God bless her.

She probably created probably 100 million search queries around her picking Glen Beck as a

Running mate.

And what were the ads, there were no ads.

It was unbelievable.

I think the biggest ad on Google was to go try the search on Bing, and I mean

I mean that’s

Incredible.

>> I think your example is an outlier.

>> I don’t think so at all.

Think about every day.

I haven’t looked at the news today.

I’m sure there’s a ton of searches going on today

>> That doesn’t go to intent.

That’s the problem with news model.

It doesn’t map to intent.

Unless you want to buy her book.

>> But there’s probably a lot of ads that would want to be solved.

>> Models around geo location.

I don’t know if this is what you meant when you said incentives, the idea if you always have

An on mobile device you are walking down the street.

There’s some sort of deal.

I worry about implications and push notifications so your phone is vibrating when you’re walking

Down the street here.

I think that’s there’s lots of opportunities for that.

>> That’s the future.

Search is not going to die it’s going to be good for what it’s good at.

In the word we’re going to be using is Sam bee yent streams, that’s around us without us taking

Any action that are relevant to what we’re doing that’s going to evolve on Facebook that’s

Why it’s critical that’s why they don’t want you going elsewhere.

>> And discovery.

Discovery is a huge, huge opportunity.

Once the IP is perfected for intent of the user, there’s a whole bunch of technology to still

Be developed here.

This market is early, early days.

And I will absolutely stand by my statement that in five years this is a multi-billion dollar

Market.

It will have monetized billions of dollars.

Because this technology is being developed right now.

Google and Bing would not have done a deal with Twitter, if they didn’t think that data was

Not monetizable and very, very valuable.

>> I agree with Ron.

I think what’s important to note in being early days on anything, look at YouTube.

Google still experimenting with the ad trials there.

They don’t know whether or not it’s going to stay a banner rolled over the ad or if it’s going

To be pre-roll, post roll or if the text ads monetize better than the other stuff.

I think for us to make a presumption right now on the best monetization strategy for

>> We’re going to do that at the end of the day.

>> Cool.

>> I think one of the things

>> Make sure Dick Costolo is around.

>> I alluded to earlier we’re talking about these sort of aggregators and portals and search

Engines that aggregate this real time data.

One thing the note is when social networks sort of took off, say five years ago or whatever,

It was now.

One of the biggest impacts on the Internet was every product you use daily became social.

Whether it was Flickr, which applied social context to photos.

Or music.

You know, with Last FM and applied sort of, Pandora, applied social context to music.

One thing, I think one of the biggest impacts of real time becoming a trend is all the verticals

Of products we use will incorporate real time discovery, personalization.

And I think that like I imagine five years from now looking back for me as a user that will

Be one of the biggest impacts.

It becomes an expectation of all users in all product categories.

I think it will have a great deal of impact, it will be disruptive to all those industries,

Just like social versions of these products were disrupted to the industries in the past.

And so that’s when I was alluding to Facebook Connect before I think it’s something that we’re

All working in this space like all looking at a single fire hose.

I think as a start-up, I would be thinking, if I applied real time discovery, real time personal

Ization to this category, how disruptive could it be.

I think that’s where a lot of interesting business models fall out.

>> That’s going to be the last word.

>> Can I launch a

to the people who are watching if you can hash tech the CrunchUp and

Let’s come up with the right vocabulary for how to call the things around the bend if it’s

Ambient streams.

Let’s start having the words to talk about these things.

I think that’s part of our challenge is in these last two conferences.

Is we need to develop the vocabulary of how we refer to this so we don’t stumble over ourselves

With semantics as we try to construct ideas and have discussions.

If it’s not just search, what is this notion of information and it’s not just push and my phone

Vibrating in my pocket.

What are the terms, what do you suggest?

>> This is all good fodder for the rest of the conference.

Please give a round of applause to our panelists.

Great job.

[APPLAUSE]

And before we break, we’re going to have a 15-minute break.

We have

we did something interesting where there were so many companies that wanted to demo

That we decided we were going to let people opt in, attendees, and I’m going to pick two names

Right now from this jar.

And whoever name I pick come up here and you will get to demo later on during the demo panels

Before and after lunch.

So the first, oh, Julian from Superfeeder, are you in

are you ready to demo?

Well.

>> Yes, come back stage during the break.

>> Come back stage.

You’ve got about an hour to figure it out.

Okay.

And who is our next lucky winner.

Bob Duku.

Somebody from bobduku.

Congratulations, are you ready to demo?

Okay.

Well, come back here and we’ll explain to you the whole situation.

It’s going to be a little bit rough.

But we’re big believers in audience participation.

We’re going to break for 15 minutes.

There’s, what, refreshments out there.

Do we need to make any other announcements?

>> There’s one announcement, which is

is the mic off?

>> What’s the announcement?

>> Luic wants to give somebody in the audience a ticket to Le Webb.

>> How do we do this?

>> It has to be somebody who wants to go, that can get themselves to Paris.

>> We’re going to give away a ticket to LeWeb before you go.

Two tickets.

So

>> CrunchUp of the Web, explain

>> Only ask if you can really use the ticket.

>> How do you know it’s somebody from here?

>> It will be somebody watching or somebody in the audience because they’re the only ones

That know about it.

>> Tweet out CrunchUp LeWeb if you want two tickets.

>> Just explain why.

>> Explain why you want to go to LeWeb.

He’ll pick it and what’s the time period?

>> Next hour?

>> Tonight.

>> By tonight.

>> Yeah.

>> Explain in one tweet why you want to go.

>> By 8:00 p.M. Tonight.

Two tickets.

>> 1500 Euros each.

>> That’s 1500 Euros each.

Julian, congratulations.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Twitter is one of the hottest players in the realtime field right now. And it has a $1 billion valuation, which has been the source of much controversy. Twitter also recently signed search deals with both Microsoft and Google.

Easily the most interesting bit of information Costolo offered up during the talk was that Twitter will soon turn on advertisements. This is surprising since in the past Twitter has said that would likely not be a part of the revenue model. But recent changes to Twitter’ TOS suggested something like this could be coming. And other more recent comments from the company have suggested the same thing. But Costolo’s comments were very clear, “Twitter will have an advertising business, ready in the near future, and available to partners.”

Costolo talked quite a bit about Twitter’s revenue model. When Mike noted that internal documents leaked this summer indicated Twitter was looking for 25 million users, $4 millon in revenue, and 75 employees by the end of this year, Costolo noted that they were “above and beyond” across those numbers across the board.

When Mike pushed about the $4 million number, Costolo would not give a specific number, but reiterated that they were certainly beyond $4 million already. He also once again confirmed that the search deals with both Microsoft and Google are bringing Twitter money, though he declined to state how much.

Costolo also talked a bit about Twitter’s freshly turned-on Geolocation API. “The opportunity around Geo is huge,” he said. He notes that the idea of the “check-in” (as opposed to location always being on) is proving to be a powerful thing thanks to services like Foursquare. Now that it’s live, Geolocation is going to be very important for Twitter going forward, Costolo noted.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

MA: Thanks for starting things off with us this morning. You had trouble getting in?

DC: I got in on time no problem.

MA: So anything we want to talk about? What’s happening?

DC: What are you doing? (Laughs) That’s exactly what I want to start with, we decided to change that wording yesterday. Before “what are you doing?” didn’t make sense. People would look and say, “what are you doing?” and they’d say “nothing.”

MA: You spent money on user studies?

DC: We did do some. We have other things to do like getting rid fo the suggested user list.

MA: When will you get rid of it.

DC: ASAP hopefully by the end of the year.

MA: When did you join?

DC: End of August.

MA: Before that you started Feedburner which Google bought. Do you like RSS is dead.

DC: No. I think what happened with RSS is what people predicted, it got pushed down the stack. You just don’t think about it anymore. You don’t know the things behind email, etc.

SG: But it got pushed down the stack by Twitter.

DC: Well it was a lot of things, but yeah Twitter was one. People are more interested in what’s happening this second now, certainly.

MA: There were some docs published this year (laughs). Did you see those docs.

DC: I saw what you posted.

MA: The financial forecast was 25 million users, $4 millon in revenue and 75 employees. What’s true?

DC: Across the board on those numbers we’re above and beyond.

MA: What about traffic?

DC: These sites aren’t great for measuring.

MA: What about user accounts?

DC: Yeah I won’t say that, but 58 million undercounts it.

MA: Growth has been great right?

DC: Yeah. But Facebook is way ahead of us with what 350 million users. Also the growth in the U.S. has slowed, as Ev said a few weeks ago. We’re making changes though to get rid of the SUL and the new site, we think it growth will return.

MA: So 10x growth next year?

DC: We’ll see.

MA: So there won’t be more people on Twitter than there are on the Internet?

DC: No.

MA: So you’ve raise $155 million right? How much is left.

DC: Yes. Plenty of money is left.

MA: What about the new offices, those aren’t cheap?

DC: There are cheap ways of doing things and smart ways. We’re not worried about runrate right now.

MA: When will you turn on revenue.

DC: Our runrate is higher than $4 million, it’s on. Before we had deals announced, everyone wanted to know about our business model – but then we did the Google and Microsoft announcements. We won’t talk details, but they are financial relationships. And they’re compelling. They point toward a way we’re going to go to market. As an open ecosystem. Partners can display our tweets, etc. We shouldn’t care where people go to say tweets.

SG: So we pay Microsoft and Google and they pay you?

DC: You click ads. Look we’re going to syndicate our data to other partners too.

MA: Like who?

DC: We’ve done those deals and there are others. 10s of thousands of ecosystem partners out there. CoTweet, TweetDeck, etc.

MA: What do you use.

DC: I use twitter.com, I’m old school. Even on the mobile, cause I’m getting a new device.

MA: Talk about the geo API.

DC: The opportunity around Geo is huge. It’s like with Foursquare, the notion of checking in some place is opt-in, it’s great. It used to be all about turning on my location, now it’s the explicit check-in. Before it was problematic. The cool thing that Dennis Crowley of Foursquare has done is to use the gesture of checking-in. I’m here for a period of time, and it’s public – and there’s a lot of things you could do with geo with that.

MA: More detail on business model?

DC: We will have an advertising strategy. You will see that from us in the future. It will be fascinating, non-traditional, and people will love it.

MA: What’s new about it?

DC: We want to do something that’s organic, like the way it happened with Google. It will work with the tweets. People will love the ads when they see it.

MA: Talk more about the ads. Mixed in with the tweets?

DC: I didn’t say that but the message I want to send is that is that there is an advertising idea and it will come next year.

———-Audience Q&A————–

Q: Is the current $4 million revenue? From where?

DC: It’s not $4 million, it’s higher. From a variety of sources.

Q: Is the SUL paid for?

DC: No the SUL is totally non-financial. It’s a super-primitive mechanism.

MA: But you take people off when you piss you off.

DC: Laughs. There’s a lot of problems with it.

Q: You didn’t say premium – but what about paying for access?

DC: It’s not just pay and free access – we’re going to provide a way for partners to participate in our business model. We’re going to be open and foster ubiquity of the tweets. We need to provide mechanisms for partners that want to do things to do things.

MA: Do any partners pay yet?

DC: We do have some payments from partners.

SG: Will there be a Twitter app store?

DC: It’s something we talk about but it’s not top of mind for us.

MA: Will there ever be decentralization?

DC: I don’t think that’s the only way to deal with scalability problems. We can absolutely scale. There are easy things to do.

SG: So why don’t you put track back in?

DC: There are 50 things we want to do to the product, that’s on there. The pace of execution within Twitter is extraordinary. We did Retweet, we did French, we did Lists, we did Geolocation.

MA: What other features?

DC: The requests are diffuse. We want to get back to the ecosystem. Like geo is only on the API, not on the site.

Q: I have a feature request. When someone starts following someone that should be a message through the stream. There is no record of how the social graph evolves now.

DC: I don’t disagree with that. There are things like that we’re thinking about it. Analytics are super important to the future of the way people use Twitter. It would be nice to see data about your tweets.

Q: Will you sell those?

DC: That will be a part of the commercial accounts package, yes. Other things are things for companies, like multiple people access. This is all what we talk about. It will roll out in the very near future.

Q: You talk open source, but you’re never at the open source meetings.

DC: Okay that’s an accusation question. Look when we hire people we ask about open source, it’s important to us. I’ve never seen people working harder in the last 3 months, and I’ve been a lot of places. When we have more people in house, I think we’ll be bigger in those meetings. We use open source, and we hope to be producers of it.

MA: Great, thanks for all your time.

SG: Is there a number to call about track?

DC: Yeah, call me.

The end.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

Transcript: Provided by PLYmedia.

Good morning.

I’m Heather Harde with TechCrunch.

We’re ready to get started.

A few, just sort of housekeeping items.

If you’re trying to get onto the Internet, make sure you connect to intercontinental conference,

The general password is real.

For those who are going to be tweeting, doing photo uploads, other real time media, we’re also

Using the hash tag CrunchUp today.

Gillmor.

Was real.

And now I think we want to kind of drill down into the different aspects of this.

What are the business opportunities.

What are the, you know, where is everybody sort of going with geo streams.

And how is this affecting media.

And investments, etc..

So we’re really going to be covering all this throughout the day.

First we’re going to start with.

>> Let’s get this going.

>> A Q&A with

>> We’ve delayed a lot.

People are coming.

>> Everyone’s here.

Stop talking?

Mike and Steve are going to interview Dick Costolo, the COO of Twitter.

Costolo.

>> Just get off the stage.

Are you back there?

>> Told me I was going to mangle it.

I did.

>> Sit right there in the middle.

Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter.

Thanks for starting things off with us this morning.

[APPLAUSE]

.

Had a little trouble getting in this morning.

You had a problem with a ferry.

>> I was here on time.

Got here right on time.

No problem.

It looked grim for a moment.

>> So we have 30 minutes to talk about, you said anything we want to talk about.

>> Anything.

>> What’s happening?

Did you get that?

>> What are you doing.

>> Oh.

Isn’t it

>> So diving right into my talking points.

So the reason we changed what are you doing to what’s happening is what if I had come out here

And you had said, “So what are you doing?

“Instead of what’s happening.

I think what we found in our user research people would sign up for Twitter and then they’d

See this box, this big white box that said: This pillow is behind me are making me slouch.

I’m not usually this slouchchy.

They see this big white box that didn’t talk about the pillow but that said what are you doing.

.

A lot of people would look at that and just say what am I doing?

God, I’m not doing anything.

[LAUGHTER]

.

This is what we’re spending the venture we just raised.

>> You said you did user studies?

>> Yeah.

>> You could just read Twitter.

You actually spent money on user studies.

>> We did a lot of user research, and you notice how I skipped right through this, you spent

A lot of money on.

We did a lot of research on, look, it’s sort of obvious that it’s no secret that when you sign

Up for Twitter, you fly into this cliff and you catch fire and you

if you’re a brave soul

And you can climb back up the cliff look over on to the vistas beyond you might be able to

Find out how to use it.

We’ve got this on boarding challenge and it’s a lot of things from simple things like what

Are you doing.

And everyone has an answer to that.

Two more sophisticated things like getting ready of SUL.

Suggested user list and replacing it with more elegant suggestions based on how maybe you got

There via a list.

Maybe you got there via David Carr’s Twitter account at the New York Times, etc. Etc..

>> When will you get rid of the suggested user list.

Is there a firm date for that?

>> No firm date for it ASP.

I hope it’s gone at the end of the year.

We’ll see if I’m right or not.

>> When did you actually join the company, August?

>> End of August.

>> So before that you were at Google.

Not doing anything with feed burner at the time, but you were COO and co-founder of feedburn

Er, which Google bought, when was that, ‘07, ‘08?

>> June of ‘07.

>> I don’t want to dwell on feed burner but it’s interesting seeing the sort of old way of

Google reader and the other readers, you know, signing up to a site with using their RSS and

The way we and others are using Twitter today as almost a feed reader.

I think Steve has written about this almost constantly.

How do you feel about that.

>> That was a jibe.

Did you catch that.

>> Do you feel like RSS is dead?

>> Do I feel like it’s dead?

No, what happens with RSS is what many a pundit predicted would happen is that it got pushed

Down the stack.

It became like SMTP or http, right?

Nobody thinks about it.

You don’t think about the Sun mail protocol anymore you hop into Gmail send people a note don’t

Think about http or Apache configurations you just use websites.

What happened with RSS it got pushed down the stack, which is what happens to technology, protocols

Or mechanisms as they mature.

>> It got pushed down the stack by Twitter.

>> I think it got pushed down the stack by a lot of stuff.

Twitter is certainly one of them.

People are more interested in what’s happening right now, this second, and now this second

And now this second.

As opposed to necessarily catching up on here the 300 pieces of news from the past couple of

Days I need to catch up on.

>> So I think that was one component of it, certainly.

I wouldn’t deny that.

>> If you look at

there’s some documents that were published earlier in the year with some

Internal Twitter information.

It was before you started.

>> I like how you changed into a low voice there.

>> I think it’s just because I’m now talking directly into the mic.

>> Maybe.

Maybe.

>> Did you see those documents?

>> Did I see them?

No, I didn’t.

>> I saw what you posted.

>> Yeah.

Were done earlier this year.

Twitter would have 25 million users.

Four million in revenue and 79 employees.

>> Can you tell us what the real numbers are and how the company, how many users do you have,

what revenue?

>> This is what I’ll say.

I’ll say we’re across the board on those

on those numbers, well above and beyond.

>> How many users are there comecourse has 58 million unique worldwide users.

>> These services measure count in traditional ways.

They measure traffic to a site or they’ve got a panel that measures the kind of

the sites

That a person users.

But it’s no secret that there are tens of thousands of ecosystem applications for at which

Twitter, including Twitter clients and mobile clients.

>> The easy thing is how many user accounts are there?

Maybe active ones.

>> That would be the easiest thing to answer.

And

but I’m not going to give you that answer.

I’m instead going to say those numbers short count Twitter significantly.

>> So 58 million short counts Twitter significantly?

>> Uh-huh.

>> Wow.

And what’s interesting is a year ago, September, comecourse did 5.5 million uniques worldwide

Now they see 58, that’s a 10 X increase something like that.

>> Little more than 10 X.

>> Pretty amazing.

I don’t think any service has grown at that level that quickly.

I’m sorry, Facebook is growing obviously a huge number of users every month.

But I don’t think they’re even approaching this growth rate.

>> You know, good, that’s a good question.

I wouldn’t know what the answer to the growth rate percentages are.

I will say this about growth.

Look Facebook’s got 350 million users, something like that now.

They’re way out ahead of us.

It’s not, you know, it’s not close right now.

The other thing I would say about user growth is it’s also no secret that user growth has diminished

Significantly for us in the U.S. Lately.

.

I’ve talked about it at the Web 2.0 conference and I said earlier hopefully the suggested user

List goes away soon and we changed to what are you doing now to what’s happening.

Knows are super small things.

There’s lots more sophisticated things we can do about on boarding users.

And we’ve got a robust group of people and team assigned to on boarding users and we’re going

To make a lot of changes there, and I think you’ll see, you know, similar changes in the numbers

As a result of that

>> You continue to see the same growth rate.

You’ll be at 10 X or more than 10 X the number of users possibly a year from now?

>> Uh-huh.

>> Wow.

>> You’re asking.

I thought you’re stating it as a fact.

>> I was asking you and you said yes.

>> No, look, you can only continue to grow at that rate for so long before you have more people

Than are on the Internet in the world.

Of course we’re not going to continue at that growth rate.

>> Clearly you’re not there because 300 million is not all the people.

>> Of course.

No, I realize that.

But Mike was saying.

>> So the only thing you’re confirming you will not have more users by this time next year

than on Internet you’re willing to say that [LAUGHTER]

>> You’re not going to continue at that growth rate for a long period of time.

It’s going to be wavy, right, of course it is.

You’re going to have dips, all services have dips.

And we need to work our way out of it and we’ve acknowledged that.

>> So you guys have raised how much money?

>> 155 million.

>> $155 million.

How much of that is left?

Probably 100?

>> About a buck 80.

[LAUGHTER]

Let’s see, plenty.

Plenty of money.

So I’ll say a couple of things about that because I can kind of see where this is going.

[LAUGHTER]

Our run rate, you know, our expenses and our burn rate, whatever you want to call it, we’re

Not going to be needing to do anything.

>> You have those amazing new offices where Bibo used to be, literally down the street.

>> I have no idea if that’s the right direction or not.

Yes literally very close by.

>> That’s not cheap.

[LAUGHTER]

.

>> There are cheap ways to do things and there are expensive ways to do things.

We’re doing a really good job of managing our costs.

Like I said, one of the things that anybody with a financial interest in a company would do

Is measure run rate or EBITDA or burn rate.

That is the least of my worries right now.

>> When you have $155 million, it’s not

>> Even if we didn’t have $155 million.

>> In all seriousness let’s talk about revenue.

When do you turn it on.

At any point you could turn on revenue and what do you think the top ways you can generate

Revenue without impacting the user experience.

>> I already told you our run rate was higher than what you suggested.

>> It’s higher than four million.

>> So it’s on.

I think that, you know, one of the funny things that happens to me is

Costolo: That from ads or search deals.

>> I was going to talk about that.

I was kind of leading into my thing.

>> I apologize.

>> You’re right there in with the knife.

>> I formally apologize.

Go ahead.

[LAUGHTER]

I don’t want to cut you off.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Hey.

>> Come on, you’re sitting by me, looking at him.

>> I’m having fun.

>> So, look, there’s a couple things.

One, when we didn’t have any deals announced, people would say, you know, when is at which

Twitter going to talk about their business model, I don’t want to have to pay for at which

Twitter, then we go out and kind of have this very explicit set of announcements with Google

And Microsoft.

And that start to point to a go to market strategy and we can talk more about that, and then

There’s

we’re obviously not going to talk about the details of those relationships, since

Those are confidential relationships.

But they’re financial relationships.

That’s been said as much by all the parties involved.

And they’re compelling.

They’re compelling relationship on all sides.

And they point toward a way we’re going to go to market.

And the way we’re going to go to market is as an open ecosystem, allowing partners to distribute

Tweets or have access to the tweets.

And redisplay them in interesting ways.

And we’re

I think

and I hope sophisticated enough to have prethought about the implications

For the tweets being displayed on other sites in a way that facilitates our business model.

>> Right.

.

>> So what I mean by that, is we shouldn’t care if people are going to Bing and Google for

Tweet search results instead of to search.Twitter.Com.

And so we’ve tried to go to market with our partners in such a way we don’t have to care if

They go there.

>> From a financial standpoint.

>> From a financial standpoint.

>> So what you’ve done is to shift, instead of paying you, we pay Microsoft and Google, and

Then they pay you?

>> Well, how much do you pay

what do you mean you’re paying Microsoft.

>> I don’t know, you’re not telling us how much you’re paying or getting paid.

>> If Microsoft and Google come to you and ask you for money.

>> Click ads.

>> Click ads.

Look, we’re going to syndicate our data to other partners who have their own business models

And have business models that are compatible with the way we’re going to market.

>> Who would you think would be stop syndication partners beyond the ones you’ve already

>> We’ve already done those deals, right?

There are others.

Of course there are others.

And, look, there are tens of thousands of ecosystem partners.

You’ve got the TweetDecks of the world.

You’ve got the real time search engines.

You’ve got companies that do data mining for brands, right?

You’ve got companies like Code Tweet that have a great model doing around essentially CRM for

Brands on Twitter.

We’ll provide all these companies with a mechanism for using the leveraging the ecosystem and

Leveraging our APIs that allow them to make a lot of money.

>> What do you use when you access Twitter?

>> I’m totally old school.

I use Twitter.Com.

And search.Twitter.Com.

>> You use your phone as well or go to the website.

>> I do use my mobile.

But I’ve got this mid-switching, mid-switching devices.

So I still use the site.

>> So you guys, fascinated by the geo API that you’ve released.

Could you talk a little bit about your strategy around GEO and what the opportunities are?

>> So the opportunity around GEO is huge.

I think that one of the things you see with applications like Foursquare is that this notion

Of checking in to someplace is an explicit op in into identifying my location.

So the challenge around geo, one of the challenges, we were talking about this back stage,

Has always been I turn on my location.

I opt into turning on my location and I leave it on and I forget about it and then three months

Later I get a call from a friend that says, hey, you’re in Las Vegas right now.

You go, where is he?

And like, oh, I left that location thing on.

And now he can see on his map that I’m in Las Vegas.

And that can be more problematic for some than others.

So the cool thing about what Dennis Crowley has done at Foursquare, and I think Dennis is a

Genius, is that he’s made explicit for a short period of time this opt in via the gesture.

I use this, little Steve Gillmor term there.

We view the gesture of checking in.

Did you like that gesture.

>> He doesn’t want me to talk about track.

So keep going.

>> So check in is an explicit I’m here for this period of time and it’s okay that it’s public.

I did it intentionally.

There are lots of interesting things that you could perceive doing with geo around that would

Otherwise be difficult, because you don’t want to have a geo AP that’s constantly don’t forget

To opt turning on your location when you want to say something about the great Indian food

You’re having.

Did that make sense?

You look bored.

>> I’m not bored at all.

I didn’t want to cut you off.

Because it clearly pissed you off when I did.

We’ve talked about just about everything I wanted to cover.

Business model.

You’re not going to go into more detail.

How about we take questions from the audience.

Hold on, audience.

Wait.

If you have a question, go ahead and line up.

We’ll take a few.

But let’s talk about business models.

>> Yeah, we will have an advertising strategy, right?

You will see an advertising strategy from us in the very near future.

And I think that it will be fascinating and completely nontraditional and people will love

It.

>> Right now you have some sort of display ads, testing, messing around.

But those text ads.

>> Yeah, yeah.

>> That’s not fascinating or unique.

>> No.

>> What was it you said how did you describe it a minute ago.

>> I don’t know I was improvising.

>> You said fascinating.

What’s new?

>> I think it will be

it will be in the genius of Google was that the

when Google first

Rolled this out was that the ads were also the kinds of things that people were looking for.

And so I think we want to do something that’s organic and in the flow of the way people already

Use Twitter and not here’s the tweets and here are the ads.

So it will be

>> It’s here are the ads mixed in with the tweets so you can’t tell the difference when you

Click on them.

>> It’s going to be really cool and people will love it when they see it.

>> People will love the ads when they see it.

People will never get so much joy on clicking on ads as they will.

>> It’s going to be really cool.

>> And this love is going to be sort of packaged up in the retweet function?

>> No.

I wouldn’t say it will be packaged up in retweet function.

>> You’re not going to be making money on retweets?

>> I don’t think we have any intention of doing anything with retweet.

>> Can you explain about the ads?

You described starting using Twitter as flying into a cliff and catching fire.

Which isn’t awesome.

And then you said these ads which will be mixed in with the tweets, correct me if I’m wrong.

>> I didn’t say mixed in with the tweets.

>> You said I want them to be in the same flow.

>> Look, the thing I want to

the message I want to send is that we’re going to have an

Advertising business.

It will be ready in the near future.

>> It will be awesome.

>> It will be available to partners.

I think it’s going to be awesome.

Available to partners.

>> What’s the near future.

This year or next year.

>> Next yearish early next year.

>> Questions from the audience.

Are you that asleep that you have no questions?

>> What’s the

>> For the COO of Twitter.

>> Camera 2

>> Do you mind using the microphone.

>> Question: My name is Adam.

The current revenue that you have right now that’s reported four million, is that coming from

The recommended followers?

>> So it’s not four million.

Mike said the run rate would be four million.

I said our run rate was higher than that.

No, it’s coming from a variety of sources.

>> Meaning two sources, Google and Bing.

>> No, it’s coming from a bunch of different things.

>> Question: Do they pay you the recommended followers?

>> The suggested user list is merely a nonfinancial artifact of when you sign up for at which

Twitter, we need to put something in front of people so that they can know what they should

Do or who they should follow.

It was a super primitive mechanism.

It is not a financial relationship.

People don’t pay us to get on the list.

It causes lots of acrimony.

>> You should take them off when they piss you off.

>> It costs lots of money.

>> TechCrunch got taken off right after they posted those documents.

That didn’t piss us off at all.

>> We know we need to get rid of it and do something more interesting there.

And we will.

>> Another question.

say who you are.

>> Question: I have a question.

You were saying

>> We’re all still waking up here.

>> You didn’t use the word premium but you did talk about in terms of your business model

Providing APIs, providing other things.

I’m thinking you’re talking about metrics.

Two partners and you mentioned things like TweetDeck and code tweet and the question is right

Now a lot of people are providing free services to their users.

>> Of course.

>> Where do you see that division being in terms of what you provide to them and how that

Gets passed off and what the difference in experience between paid and free is going to be

For accessing it.

>> It’s not going to be, so I’m not trying to send the message it’s going to be paid and free

Access.

What we’re going to do

so thank you for asking that question.

What we’ll do with all our ecosystem partners is provide them a way to participate in the business

Model.

And it’s not going to necessarily be, you know, you pay us a bunch of money and then here you

Get to keep using it.

That’s not at all the idea.

The whole concept behind the Twitter ecosystem is we are going to be open.

We are going to foster ubiquity of the tweets.

We want to do things like, you know, if you’re a start-up and you have no money but you have

This great idea around displaying tweets, or using Twitter for certain B to B applications

You should be able to do that without having any money.

We’re absolutely going to continue to do those things F but what we’re also going to do is

For companies that want to work with us in a more in depth way, with a service level agreement

That they don’t have today, you know, when TweetDeck or other people uses the as-is search

API today it’s as is.

If it stops working or we say you’re over your QPS limit, too bad.

So what we should do is foster mechanisms, provide mechanisms that allow partners that want

To do more sophisticated things to do those things and that’s what I’m talking about.

Not charging the people that are doing simple things for free.

>> Do any of these partners pay you yet?

>> We get paid by partners for certain pieces of the API.

>> Louie, I see you in the audience with Seesmic.

Do you pay Twitter anything?

>> No, but as soon as we stop doing revenue, we’ll be able to share [phonetic].

>> Will there be a Twitter AP store.

>> There’s a lot of talk about the Twitter ap store.

It’s a discussion we have internally a lot.

It’s not top of mind for us.

I think top of mind for us right now is on boarding and discovery.

Right.

How do we get the best tweets in front of people without lots of effort on their part.

It should be effortless.

We don’t think a lot about an AP store.

It’s been suggested and one of the debates that rages internally that we don’t feel any your

Urgency dealing with right now.

>> We’ve had this debate for a long time now.

But I don’t believe it is sort of theoretically possible for Twitter to scale given the snaur.

You said it will.

Given that you’re the COO of the company.

Do you ever see decentralization as an option whether you can scale it or not getting at which

Twitter servers out to people so they can run their own at which timers.

>> That’s another debate that rages inside the company whether Twitter remains a centralized

Service.

There are ways to decentralize it, etc..

I would say that debate or discussion is disconnected from the scalability question.

For example, we don’t say, hey, we have the scalability challenge and the only way to deal

With it is decentralization.

There’s a scalability challenge and there’s a separate discussion around decentralization.

>> Which side are you on?

>> To the scalability side.

On the scalability point, there’s no question it can scale.

There are

>> There’s a question.

I asked it.

You said absolutely it can.

>> It can absolutely scale.

>> There are easy things you can do around the ways to fan out tweets to followers even if

You have a million, ten million, 100 million followers.

In a scaleable manner.

Efficient manner.

>> Why don’t you put track back in?

>> That’s a good question.

It’s a little off topic.

>> Google is starting to put track in Google alerts.

>> Yeah.

There are 50 things we want to do to the product, right?

>> Yeah.

>> And it remains at the bottom of the list, right?

>> There’s an

I would say the interesting, the really cool thing about working at at which

Twitter, when you’re on the inside, is that the pace of execution by the small team that’s

There, considering the size of our user base, is extraordinary.

So yesterday, you know, two days ago we rolled retweet out to 100 of our users.

Yesterday we launched Twitter in French.

Two days ago launched an enhancement, specific enhancements to lists.

We rolled out the GeoAPI fully.

There’s this pace of execution that’s absolutely remarkable given the scaling and the speed

Of scaling.

>> The track is

if you’re in the audience, track, do you all understand what track is,

Sort of the Google alerts for Twitter.

How many people would it be your number one feature request at Twitter is to have track?

100 percent of the audience just raised their hands.

>> Let me ask it a different way.

>> What are the top feature requests, since only a few people, just yell them out.

>> They’re very diffuse.

>> These guys are still asleep.

>> The feature requests are diffuse.

And there are certain things, look, there are certain things that we want to do that are important

Because they go to the core platform and those can be fanned out to ecosystem partners, right?

Getting back to the ecosystem, the geo stuff is purely

>> It’s not even on Twitter.Com.

>> It’s purely to the API to foster interesting geo uses of the API and improve the kinds

Of user experiences you can have with mobile Twitter.

>> I have a feature request, actually.

So when someone adds a friend or starts following someone, that should be a message through

The stream.

Because right now

if you’re doing analytics, there’s no historical record of how the social

Graph is evolving over time.

At least for us.

You guys may have that data.

But we don’t.

So it would be really, really awesome, when people started following other people, this became

A tweet just like anything else and it could just go through all those other mechanisms.

>> Yep.

I don’t disagree with that.

Right?

There’s a lot of things like that you should be able to

>> Get track before that.

>> Track is just one of many features that people want that is something we’ll

>> Our audience has spoken.

Track is

it was 100 percent.

All right.

One last question.

>> So to the point in the back, analytics are super important to the future of the way people

Use Twitter.

It would be really nice to see how your tweets fan out and what the usage of them are and what

Kinds of things were more interesting than others, etc.

>> Are you guys going to sell analytics or provide

>> We talked about before the fact we’ll have commercial accounts package and that commercial

Accounts package, one of the fundamental features of that commercial accounts package for businesses,

Will be an analytics dashboard.

Other things will include stuff like, you know, the kinds of things that companies would want

For their accounts.

Right?

Like I want multiple people to author to this one account, and maybe I turn myself on and now

I’ve got the controls and this person’s checked out.

Etc. Etc..

So that’s absolutely something we have talked about before.

We’ve said we were going to roll it out soon.

We continue to be on the time frame of rolling it out in the very near future.

>> Kevin.

>> Question: So you’re talking about openness in ecosystem but I haven’t seen anyone at at

Twitter at any of the IW open standards stuff.

When there were five of you now there’s 60 of you we’re not seeing you anymore.

Please come out more.

>> I think the question was an accusation question.

[LAUGHTER]

>> Good to see you.

Not an accusation.

>> We’ve known each other for a while.

I’m giving him a hard time.

So why aren’t we

look, when our engineers interview people, one of the questions a lot of

Them ask is tell me about your contributions to open source.

It’s like super important to the team and the community and we understand that.

It’s also the case that I’ve never seen people working, you know, harder and more passionate

Ly and I’ve worked in a bunch of places, than I have in the last three months, and people are

Just absolutely, you know, the pedal is to the ground.

So when what you will see is when we have more engineers in house and more people doing the

Kinds of things that everyone is wearing four hats for right now, we will be more par tis pa

Ticipatory in all of those avenues.

We use open source.

We hope to be producers of it.

You’ll see nothing but advocacy from us on that front.

>> I appreciate all your time.

I appreciate you coming out here first thing in the morning.

Sounds like you have some great stuff coming up.

>> Happy to be here.

>> And you’re going to keep this sort of open door so that we can

is there a number I can

Call to ask them about where track is on that list?

>> Yeah, my cell phone.

Text me.

>> What is your Twitter.

It’s DickC.

Photo is courtesy of Kenneth Yeung.

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For those who have not had the opportunity to try Brizzly yet, it’s a web app that serves as a way to interact with both Twitter and now Facebook. It has advantages over Twitter’s regular website because it shows pictures and videos inline, and they actually did lists (which they called Groups) before Twitter. Now that Twitter has rolled out that functionality, Brizzly has integrated it. Perhaps more importantly, Brizzly also offers as one-click way to do the old-school way of retweeting. You know, the “RT” way.

But the opening of its service is not all Brizzly is announcing today: They’ve also made a new hire. Ben Darnell joins the team from Facebook, where he worked for just a few short months since he came over after the FriendFeed acquisition. But Darnell’s ties run close to Brizzly as he’s a former Googler like Thing Labs’ Jason Shellen, Chris Wetherell, Dolapo Falola. At Google, Darnell was one of the original Google Reader team members.

With Brizzly, Darnell will work on “larger framework for communication and content discovery,” Shellen tells us. This means he’ll be working on their infrastructure and APIs.

And Brizzly has one more new trick up its sleeve today: On-the-fly translation of tweets. While Twitter is busy rolling out its service into other languages, Brizzly is translating it to anyone who wants it thanks to Google Translate. Translating a tweet is as simple as clicking a button.

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As the service announced in October, it needed help from the community in order to roll out to the so-called “FIGS” languages. That is French, Italian, German, and Spanish. Just over a month later, 2 of those are already complete.

Just as they did the last time, Twitter wrote the entire post in the new lanuage, so we’ll give a rough translation here:

With the addition of the Spanish version of the site last month, many people have joined the conversations on Twitter. More and more people tweet outside the United States and we are now able to accommodate users of nearly 30 Francophone countries. It is now possible to change the language settings in French with the participation of translators who have helped turn Twitter into a platform for truly global communication.

The French twitteurs golds can already track people and companies they are familiar. Whether you attended @lepicerie or @lopera for your gastronomic outings, you read @lemondefr way to work or you listen @theteenagers on the way home or you’re a fan of @CanadiensMTL, there is a wealth of information useful to discover at any time.

To see Twitter in French, just check your settings and select “French” from the menu.

One last thing: some of the Twitter team will be in Paris on 9 and 10 November for LeWeb conference, presented by @loic. The specialists of our platform, Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) and Marcel Molina (@noradio) will present, among other things, a session developers. If you are in the region these days, please join us!

As they note, they got this done just in time for LeWeb, where member of Twitter’s team will be talking about their platform. Quite a few members of TechCrunch will be participating in the event as well. And no doubt even more people will be tweeting about it now.

UPDATE: In fact TechCrunch Europe is helping to organise the Startup Competition at Le Web.

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This means that applications that have been built using the APIs — such as Birdfeed, which we previewed recently — will be the first to be able to use location features. As Twitter notes, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and a few others are also supporting location right now.

As you can see in the screenshot, there is a new “Enable geotagging” option in the Settings menu on Twitter. It’s important to note that this feature is entirely opt-in. There is also a button to delete all your location data if you feel the need to do that. The process apparently takes up to 30 minutes to complete.

It’s worth noting that Twitter snuck in a post about its new privacy policy just before the Geolocation post. For those interested, find the updated policy here. Twitter says it basically just updated the language to account for the new location functionality.

Location appears to be a big part of Twitter’s strategy going forward. Not only do they have the Geolocation API, but they have a new API to serve up better Trending Topics based on location.

In his blog post, Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver notes, “This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet.” “Yet” is the key word there. Given the extensive UI changes Twitter has undergone in the past few weeks with features like Lists and now Retweets being added, it shouldn’t be that surprising that Twitter is choosing not to roll this out on the main site right now. But you can be sure it will be a part of the experience eventually.

Developers interested in Geolocation should also look at the notes left today in the Twitter API Google Group.

Twitter has a good sense of timing with this rollout as our Realtime Crunchup is taking place tomorrow in San Francisco, and Sarver will be a part of our panel talking about geolocation. It’s good that he now has something to talk about.

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If you visit the regular Techmeme site now on devices like an iPhone, a Palm Pre, or the new Verizon Droid, you’ll see a site optimized for touchscreen phones. The site include three main tabs, “Top, ” More,” and “New.” These represent the three key areas of Techmeme’s main site. This tabbed navigation allows you to easily jump through the sections. Each section contains the main headlines and a right pointing arrow which you click on to see the discussion items.

As you’d expect, clicking on any headline opens that story (in a new browser window). Thumbnail pictures are also pulled in for main headlines. And there’s a ‘back’ button to make navigation easy.

Even if you don’t have an officially supported device, anyone can access the new site by visiting techmeme.com/m/. But why not do a native application, such as an iPhone app? “We might make a native app in the future, but with Android phones multiplying and capable browsers appearing on so many devices, it just made sense to start with something with broader support,” founder Gabe Rivera tells us.

Just yesterday, Techmeme announced that it had doubled it staff to 6 people.

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Though they haven’t formally announced the massive expansion yet, which pretty much doubles their total (they had 53 cities previously), Foursquare’s Harry Heymann tweeted about the addition today. And if you look in the site’s city drop down list, you’ll see a huge list of new cities.

After a quick scan, new ones I see include Oslo, Mumbai, Brighton, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, and a bunch in China (Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai) and Australia (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne). There also look to be a bunch of new U.S. additions like Bristol, CT, Columbus, OH, and Tucson, AZ.

Update: And here’s the official post on it. Complete with a list of new cities:

NORTH AMERICA
Charlotte, NC
Columbus, OH
Honolulu, HI
Louisville, KY
Memphis, TN
Nashville, TN
New Haven, CT
Oklahoma City, OK
Orlando, FL
Park City, UT
Providence, RI
Sacramento, CA
Tampa, FL
Tucson, AZ

Calgary, Canada
Edmonton, Canada
Ottawa, Canada

Mexico City, Mexico

SOUTH AMERICA
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
São Paulo, Brazil

EUROPE
Birmingham, UK
Bristol, UK
Brighton, UK
Cologne, Germany
Edinburgh, UK
Frankfurt, Germany
Hamburg, Germany
Lisbon, Portugal
Milan, Italy
Oslo, Norway
Reykjavik, Iceland
Vienna, Austria
Zurich, Switzerland

AFRICA
Johannesburg, South Africa

MIDDLE EAST
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Mumbai, India
Tel Aviv, Israel

ASIA
Beijing, China
Bangkok, Thailand
Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Seoul, Korea
Shanghai, China
Singapore, Singapore
Tokyo, Japan

AUSTRALIA
Brisbane, Australia
Melbourne, Australia
Sydney, Australia

NEW ZEALAND
Wellington, New Zealand

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Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google’s Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS are speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

Below find our live notes (paraphrased):

SP: Welcome everyone. We’re here today to talk about Google Chrome OS. We aren’t launching it today and not beta today. But we’ve made progress. As of today the code will be completely open. We’re excited to announce this.

Google Chrome is foundation of everything we’re doing here. Why do Chrome. It’s been a year. We just announced we’re over 30 million users – and now we’re already over 40 million users. We focused on speed, simplicity, and security. It’s 40% faster in JS than IE8. “One is fast and one is slow.” The most common feed back we get is “Chrome is fast.”

In the last year we’ve updated Chrome about 40 times, but most users don’t even notice. And we’re really focused on HTML5. We really want to push the web forward.

Just this year there is tons of new stuff coming:

1) Chrome for Mac will be ready before the end of the year. Very close now.

2) Chrome for Linux is coming along very well. That’s the foundation of Chrome OS.

3) Extensions are coming. We’ve taken our time to do this right. We have more details coming about extensions with certain partners. These update automatically.

HTML5, we want the web to apps as well as they do natively. We’ve been working hard on this. We want web apps to be able to use system resources the same way. Graphics is one example, we need a way to access to the GPU. Audio/video playback is key. And we need apps to work offline. We’re working with the other major browser vendors to make sure HTML5 comes along.

The growth in netbooks is amazing. Growth is exploding despite the recession. Ultra thin, ultra light computers. The trend is clear that we’re moving to web applications – not desktop applications. It’s the most successful platform out there right now. We’re moving from laptops down to netbooks on the regular computer end. On the other side we’re going from phones to tablets – these are all computers. Laptops are becoming more like phones too – always on connectivity.

Is there a better model of personal computing? We believe so. That’s Chrome OS.

We focus on three things. Speed. Simplicity. Security.

We want Chrome OS to be blazingly fast, basically instant-on. Chrome (the browser) on Chrome OS is going to be much faster.

In Chrome OS every application is a web application. There are no native applications. That gives us simplicity. It’s just a browser with a few modifications. And all data is Chrome OS is in the cloud. This is key, we want all of personal computing to work this way. If you lose your machine, you just get a new one, and it works. With security, because everything is a web app, we can do different things. No system is ever fully secure. With Chrome OS no user install binaries, so we can see bad things easier. We run completely inside the browser security model.

——–DEMO———

It takes about 7 seconds to to go the log-in screen. And another 3 seconds to log in to your application. And we’re working to make that faster.

Should be no surprise that it looks like Chrome the browser. We are opening up the project a year ahead of release right now. A lot of the UI will change in that time. But many of the core concepts here will carry over into the final product.

It looks like Chrome but it has application tabs. (Just like the pictures we posted.) And there is an App Menu. The UI will change a bit, but we want to give you a way to find your favorite applications. Panels are pesistent lightweight windows that never move. Buddy lists and chat are great for this. Or a notepad. And media pops up in little windows.

Demo of a chess game being played within the browser. And you can allow it to take over the full screen so you don’t realize you’re in the browser.

And we want you to be able to read books in Chrome OS. And YouTube videos look great. And there is an all view mode (and the YouTube video is still playing. You can drag and drop tabs. “It just works.”

What happens if you plug in a camera? It simply opens a window with the camera’s files. I can pull any picture and open it in a new browser window.

Microsoft Office launched a killer-app for Chrome OS (laughs). So if you get an Excel doc, it will open in Office online.

People have many types of files with computers right? They need to get in them. Like PDFs, but these work instantly in the browser too.

———–Time for Matthew Papakipos to go under the hood of Chrome OS—————–

MP: Excited about the tech under the hood. All the code is out in the open now, you can go check it out.

We want this to feel much more like a television than a computer. All Chrome OS devices will be based on solid-state storage.

One of the reasons computers boot so slowly today is that they’re still looking for things like floppy drives. Does anyone use those anymore? No. We cut out a lot of the startup processes. And we open the browser immediately. And we have something called Verified Boot – Chrome OS auto-updates itself with all the security patches. Everytime you boot we double check that you’re running what you should be running. If something fails the cryptographic system check, we reboot to get a clean image. Basically this is system recovery.

Current OSes allow apps to have the same power as you. They can modify files, etc. This means a rogue app can do bad things. In Chrome OS all the apps are web apps, with a different security model. All apps are treated as if they are hostile at a system level. A web app can change files on your hard disk, etc.

And we have security sandboxing – same thing we do in Chrome. Every tab run in Chrome OS is locked down and different from other tabs.

The File System: It’s always auto-updated. There are a few areas of the hard disk. The root partition is read-only. This is locked down, which is unusual in OSes today. User data is always encrypted. This is key for safety of your data. So important if you lose your machine.

All user data is synced with the cloud at all times. If you lose your machine, it’s not really gone.

———Back to Sundar Pichai——-

This is all about offering a choice for users.

We’re not going to go into too much detail about going to market today. We’re working on the software right now, but we are also working with manufacturers on the hardware level. For example, we only support solid-state drives and certain types of WiFi cards.

You cannot download and install Chrome on any machine. You will have to buy a new one.

End of next year. Before the holiday season.

While netbooks are popular, but some have usability issues. We want to make slightly larger netbooks with full sized keyboards and big trackpads.

Again, the code is all open source now. The Linux kernal, Unbuntu, Moblin have all been important to what we’re doing now. We can’t wait to see what people do with our code now.

If you are a developer and have the right type of netbook (and a screwdriver) you can get Chrome OS running today.

————Video Demo Time———–

———-Q&A Time———

Q: So many questions. One is what is the focus group for this type of device? I have an Android device now – can you run Android apps on Chrome OS? And Android devices are becoming so powerful, so why not just use this – is there a Chrome server solution?

SP: There are many possibilities. What we are doing across Android is great because it’s all open-source too. I think we’re going through a shift in computing, it’s exciting. Time will tell.

Q: Do you know what this Chrome OS netbooks will cost?

SP: You will hear that from our partners. They will be in the price range that people are used to for netbooks today. But it’s hard to predict a year from now. Also remember, they will be bigger.

Q: Price target you want to hit?

SP: No we don’t have one.

Q: What netbook are you running this on right now (for the demo)?

SP: That’s an Eee PC.

Q: With the APIs support W3C working group standards? What about docs for partners?

SP: There’s a lot of documentation on our website. And we’ve been reaching out to partners for a while.

MP: For standards, yes we’re working closely with all the standards group like W3C to standardize as much as we can. But web standards take a while to be finalized. But it’d be nice to see all this on different OSes.

Q: Will there be an app store? What about driver certification? What about editing apps – like editing photos?

SP: We will have more details about the idea of an app store down the line. We care about web apps – on the web there are hundreds of millons of applications.

MP: We’re working closely with hardware makers for the drivers.

SP: Back to apps that you can’t use on the web, like powerful editing. This will be a secondary device, it may be a primary device in terms of time spent on it, but we expect people to have other computers too.

Q: Codec support and native client support?

MP: Yes, everything that works in Chrome will work in Chrome OS.

SP: And we’re investing in new tech to make web apps run just like desktop apps. Chrome OS will also influence Chrome (the browser).

Q: Will you support Silverlight?

SP: Certain select plug-ins we’re trying to work on. But I don’t have a comment on working with Microsoft (laughs).

Q: Other browsers?

SP: Chrome OS is all about Chrome, so another browser can’t really work here. That said, it’s open source, so other browser makers can make their own OSes if they want.

Q: Will the system be exclusive to netbooks or other devices too? Any hardware partners you can make?

SP: Hardware details will come in the middle of next year. We are intially fully focused on netbook-like computers (clam shell). In the future it will be able to work on anything though.

Q: How big is the whole OS?

SP: Since it’s open source, there’s a lot in there right now. But we’re working hard to make it simple.

Q: Offline access with Gears? What about being on a plane?

SP: WiFi is the use case we have in mind. But having said that, there will be ways to plug in and play media (listen to music and read books, etc) And with HTML5 there is offline support.

Q: What WiFi will you use?

MP: We’re focused on 802.11n.

Q: Virtualization, can you run it now?

MP: Sure, you could build it and run it in a virtual machine. That’s a great way to compile and debug.

Q: What about partners like Adobe? So Android’s marketplace is key – what about Android apps on Chrome?

SP: Independent of Chrome OS we’re all about moving web apps forward – including things like Photoshop on the web. Android apps currently will not run on Chrome OS.

Q (from Mike): Steve Jobs said the same thing when he launched the iPhone (about web apps). There will be pressure to get Android like apps right?

SP: Currently we’re only working with web apps. The iPhone was a bit different because THEY made their own native apps. We’re not doing that, we’re doing all web apps for Chrome OS. Netbooks are a better size for web apps.

Q: What processors will this run on?

SP: x86 and ARM eventually.

Q: So different code?

MP: Not ready to answer that, but basically yes.

Q: What about other machine timeline? What about business model?

SP: We’re just focused on netbooks in 2010. For business model, Chrome OS is free, using the web more benefits us for a company.

Q: Any new ads in Chome OS?

SP: No plans for that. These are all just web apps.

Q: What does Chrome OS do that other browsers on other OSes can’t do?

SP: Most of what we show here you can do in other browser. But there are new user concepts we’re exposing, app tabs, panels, and there will be more.

MP: We can do more stuff with the file system and faster boot times.

Q: How do you get people past the cloud reliability? And what about storing this on Google’s servers.

SP: If your cloud is down, it affects every computer now, so this isn’t really much different. Compare the cloud reliability with what you have to do – the cloud compares favorably. In terms of trust, it’s important that users have choice. And things are open so developers can tell users what is going on.

Q: Is the Signature process – is Google in charge of that?

MP: Yes, we’ll open source that as well.

———Google co-founder Sergey Brin Enters———

Q: Chrome runs JavaScript really well – what about supporting Java?

SP: Technically there is nothing limiting what you’re talking about. But we’re focused on web apps.

Q: Dell has a full laptop but also a small netbook that runs ARM and is instant-on. Any plans to be a second OS on a laptop?

MP: No we’re focused on being the core OS on a machine.

Q: What about running printers or flip cams?

SP: We plan for all standard keyboards, mice, and storage devices. For printing – we’ll have more to share next year. Yes Chrome OS will print. We’re working on it.

Q: Is this about moving the community/ecosystem forward again?

MP: Yes definitely, that’s why we’re open sourcing it. Hopefully this will help other products out there. This makes it easier to work with hardware vendors too.

Q (from Steve): Realtime notifications on every page?

SB: I think we definitely need support for that in the browser. And especially in Chrome OS. Hopefully we can solve the problem of chatting when you’re not signed in to Google.

MP: There is a new notification API standard that is being worked on now.

Q: What about Wave.

SB: Wave will work with that.

Q: What is Chrome’s strategic position for Google?

SB: We really focus on user needs rather than strategies based on other companies. Netbooks are now $300 or $400 you can buy a bunch, but there’s no good way to manage a bunch of them — that’s where the web comes in, and Chrome OS comes in.

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As the Twitter mobile account noted earlier tonight, if you simply send “RT USERNAME” to 40404 (at least in the U.S.) it will automatically retweet the last tweet of whatever username you entered has sent. And yes, it will be a new-style Retweet.

If you love the new Retweets, that’s a great feature. If you hate them, well, then, you’ll hate this too. For more on that, see here.

Regardless, Twitter’s quick moves to expand and extend mobile support is pretty impressive.

A couple other things worth noting about Retweet now that it’s live for everyone:

1) You can stop seeing the new Retweets from any user simply by clicking on their profile and making sure the rotating arrow badge under their name is not green.

2) New style Retweets do not show up in your @replies section. To see them, you have to go into the new Retweets section and click on the “Your tweets, retweeted” area.

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The new look is quite magazine-like. Look for it to go live shortly.

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This message currently graces every page on Engadget. We’re not sure what they’re up to [Update: Yes we are.], but it’s promised to be “awesome awesome stuff,” editor-in-chief Joshua Topolsky tweets.

In fact, beyond the in your face teaser promising that, “What’s next is coming now. Stay close.”, Topolsky has been tweeting teasers all night. So Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera decided to respond (below):

Not ones to be left out of a super awesome please-refresh-our-page-every-5-seconds-party, we have a page of our own now (below):

(And before we start an Internet flame war, we’re just having some good clean fun with our friends at Engadget. We too are interested to see what their surprise is.)

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Version 2 has been beta testing for several months now, and a release candidate was unveiled a couple weeks ago. For a while, there was some concern that its release would get pushed indefinitely since the lead on it, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy helping Google build Chrome for Mac. But, “Mike is still involved in overseeing changes that land, planning features, and overall guidance for the project. While his day job may be Chromium, he continues to lead the Camino Project in his spare time,” Samuel Sidler, Camino’s team coordinator tells us.

And that spare time is apparently enough, as not only is Camino 2 here, but it’s being released ahead of even a beta version of Chrome for Mac (which should be coming in a few weeks).

Camino uses the same Gekko 1.9 rendering engine that Firefox 3 uses, which ensures that the majority of the web looks great in it. But the Camino browser maintains more of a Mac-style since it was built as Mac-only from the ground up, whereas Firefox was not. One great looking feature is the Tab Overview page, which shows a nice visual representation of the tabs you have open (pic below). Camino also has a built-in option to block web ads.

One downside of the browser is that Firefox plug-in lovers are out of luck with Camino. But I don’t consider that to be a big downside, since it keeps the browsing experience very fast. Download Camino 2 here.

So what’s new in Camino 2? Here’s a rundown:

Improved tabbed browsing

The Tab Overview feature displays a grid of thumbnails of the tabs in the current window.

Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.

Command-click now defaults to opening links in new tabs instead of new windows.

New security features

Camino now supports the Google Safe Browsing service to provide warnings about many potentially malicious websites.

Camino now displays error pages for secure web pages using invalid or untrusted certificates.

Full content zoom

Camino now has support for making the entire contents of a web page bigger or smaller.

Download notifications

If Growl is installed, Camino will generate notifications when downloads begin and finish.

On Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, Camino will bounce the downloads folder in the Dock when a download finishes.

Recently closed pages

The History menu now contains a sub-menu listing the last 20 closed web pages.

Improved support for Full Keyboard Access

When Full Keyboard Access is enabled, tabbing now moves correctly through the entire browser window.

Enhanced annoyance blocking

Camino now includes an exceptions list to allow disabling “Block Flash animations” on a per-site basis and an “Allow Flash From This Site” contextual menu item to ease adding sites to the exceptions list.

New AppleScript capabilities

AppleScripts can now obtain the HTML source or text of an entire web page or of a selection.

Added AppleScript support for setting the active tab in each browser window.

Web content support

Camino now uses version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, which contains thousands of bug fixes, better web plug-in compatibility and performance, enhanced support for web standards, and new technologies like JavaScript 1.8.

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Rich DeMuro (formerly of CNET), Lidija Davis (formerly of ReadWriteWeb) and Mahendra Palsule (a former IT project manager) all join McCarthy to make up the editorial staff for Techmeme. Rivera notes that this team means they basically have human eyes watching for the best tech news 24 hours a day now. This allows Rivera and his fellow programmer, Omer Horvitz to keep the backend and the algorithm rolling.

When Rivera announced the addition of a human editor last year, it caused some controversy. Many people believed that only using a set of algorithms for surfacing news was better because it would take out much of the bias that a human might introduce to the system. But Rivera believes this curation is an integral part of the process to help with fast breaking news and to better filter out spam and old news being re-reported.

The result is a site that seems to be head and shoulders above other tech new aggregators, including Google News, which is quite bad. Maybe we’re a bit biased, since we sit atop Techmeme’s Leaderboard, but the other praise Techmeme has gotten throughout the years doesn’t lie (see the BlurbLog on the side of Rivera’s blog post).

Techmeme is also clearly Twitter-crazy now. Several months ago they added a way to tip stories to the site using the “tip @techmeme” syntax in tweets. That continues to be a valuable part of the site. Today, Rivera is highlight a Techmeme Twitter team list as well.

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A new feature in Gmail Labs allows you to change your contacts’ circular chat status icons in Android logo status icons. But the key is that these icons only change for users who are currently online on their Android phones.

Google’s official stance on this is as follows:

These icons can help you decide whether to tailor your conversation to the type of device that your chat buddy is using. For example, when you know the guy on the other end is using his Android phone, you may decide to send shorter, more concise chat messages.

Of course, they don’t tailor these icons for any other type of phone, just Android. It seems if Google really wants to help with mobile chat experiences, they could also have BlackBerry icons, Pre icons, etc. I would bring up iPhone icons, but Apple would probably sue Google if they tried to use that — I wish I were kidding.

This is a fun little feature for Android users, and as I said, totally innocuous. But I do wonder what else Google has up its sleeve for cross promotion as they continue to move into new businesses. Remember, the Droid was already advertised on Google’s homepage, something they rarely do. And remember too what got Microsoft in trouble in the 90s: Bundling products with its dominant operating system.

Again, before everyone gets their panties in a bunch, this example clearly isn’t a big deal. But think forward a bit as the web becomes more and more of the dominant platform rather than the operating system. And Google controls that domain. And product creep is happening.

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Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Social networking has been perhaps the most popular trend on the Internet over the past several years. At first the term was ironic. “Social networking” was anything but social in the traditional sense. But over time, we’ve grown accustomed to the idea that you can do social activities such as play games, collaborate on work, and talk, online. And in fact, many times it’s even more convenient than doing it in person. It’s social, but it’s a different kind of social.

Ever since the term was born, countless people have debated the implications of taking social interactions virtual. At one point or another I’m sure that it has been said that it would be both the downfall of mankind, and the thing that would bring the planet together. The truth is that social networking, while great in many respects, does not fulfill a fundamental human desire: To be in the actual presence of other people.

If you’ll allow me to be embarrassingly obvious for a second: Sitting in a chat room all day, even if all of your friends are in it as well, is not the same as being in the same physical room with them. Even if you all are having great discussions in the chat room, and not saying a word when you’re hanging out with one another, there is just something that’s different. Something that social networking will never be able to replace.

That’s where location comes in. It has the power to be the bridge between social networking and actual social interaction. We’re already seeing the very early signs of this with services like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite, and Google Latitude, to varying degrees.

To the masses, most of these services still either don’t make sense, or are way too creepy. Social networks used to be thought of in the same way. This will change.

The people who do use these services likely have at least one story about a situation where a friend saw where they were, or where they planned to be, and showed up to meet up. Some have many of these stories. And for some of us in cities where these services are popular, this happens just about everyday. And it’s really quite amazing.

Is it annoying if a friend shows up if you want to be alone or don’t want to see them? Of course. But that’s why it’s important that you’re in control of what location information you are sending out. Is it creepy if a stranger shows up to meet you somewhere? Of course, but that’s why privacy settings are so important.

Make no mistake, there are hurdles to location-based services gaining widespread acceptance. But the upside of it far outweighs the downside. And with that the case, these types of services are ripe to take off.

At the core level, using a social network to facilitate actual social interaction just seems to make sense. Though I poked fun at them in the intro of this post, don’t think that Facebook doesn’t recognize this. In some ways they already do this through their popular events offering. But anything they do with location — which it should be no surprise, they are working on — will go far beyond this. When you have a social graph with over 300 million users and you add a realtime location component into the mix, it’s going to change things.

I remember the first time I used sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Friendster (back in the day) to find people that I went to high school with who I hadn’t talked to in years. It was a little weird, but also in some ways exciting. Imagine that transfered into the real world. Maybe you’re in a city with a person you went to high school with, but hadn’t talked to in years. It’s unlikely that the two of you were ever run into each other randomly, but maybe you can get pinged by Facebook location when they’re nearby. Maybe neither of you want to meet, and that’s fine. But maybe you do.

The word we keep hearing over and over again for such situations is “serendipity,” but really it’s not. None of this needs to be left up to chance. It’s simply an extension of social networking into the real world.

Another social network, Twitter, is already in hot pursuit of such functionality. Any day now, the service will turn on its geolocation service which will both allow you to send tweets with your location tacked on, and allow you to pass in location information from other services, like Foursquare. As a service with tens of millions of users, Twitter will be the first massive test of location as an extension of social networking.

It may be a while before users start truly taking advantage of it since it is an opt-in feature. But eventually, I believe we’ll see more and more users opt-in to be able to use third-party clients like Birdfeed which let them choose which tweets to attach their location to and let people know where they are.

And beyond individual user data, this location data will be very interesting as an aggregate. Undoubtedly people will use things like Twitter’s geolocation APIs to make services that can show where people are flocking to in realtime. This is the next step for what services like SocialGreat are doing with location data, showing hot spots in towns. And we already know that Twitter is planning to use the data to tailor its trending topics to show the hot things being tweeted about in specific places.

Social networking up until this point has been great. But it’s also really a bit odd. The core concept is still to gather your friends in a virtual construct, while the companies behind these constructs convince you to hang out in them as much as possible. Instead, they should be using the interesting social data they have to help you connect in other places as well. That’s what makes Facebook Connect is so powerful. But that doesn’t extend to the real world yet. But with location, it could. And that’s exciting.

We’ll be discussing this and other topics at our Realtime CrunchUp this Friday in San Francisco.

[images: MGM and Warner Brothers]

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TypePad Micro will be very familiar to anyone who has ever used Tumblr or Posterous in the past. I hate the term “micro-blogging,” but that’s essentially what this is in the eyes of some people. That is to say, it’s a platform that makes it easy to quickly post items you find that you enjoy from around the web. You can certainly use it to write more traditional blog posts if you want, but the clear emphasis is on sharing links, photos, music, and other quick-share items from around the web.

Of course, some people also consider Twitter to be micro-blogging, but as it lays out in its post, TypePad considers the new Micro product be fit in between what people do on Twitter, and what they do on regular blogs.

TypePad’s goal with Micro is pretty straightforward: Get more people using their platform, product manager Leah Culver (formerly the creator of Pownce, which TypePad parent Six Apart acquired last year) tells us. The idea is that if users like using TypePad Micro enough, maybe they’ll pay to upgrade to one of the Pro accounts which offer more options such as being much more customizable, adding other blogs, and giving you the option of placing ads on your site. Thankfully, if you stick with the free version, TypePad doesn’t plaster your blog with ads that they’re making money from.

And with more people using TypePad in general, it benefits the users who are already paying to use it, since the ecosystem will get larger and their posts will have more potential reach.

With the free version there are some options you get, such as the ability to set a site banner and change your sites’ colors. A nicer feature is the ability to see all your stats. And since Twitter integration is built in complete with Bit.ly links, you can also easily view those stats. Facebook integration is built-in as well to easily auto-posts your post to your Wall. And there is already an iPhone app.

But the most important element of these micro-blogging sites is the bookmarklet. And TypePad Micro has a very nice one. Rather than being of the bulky, pop-a-new-window variety like Tumblr, TypePad Micro’s pops up as an overlay on whatever site you are on. And if that site contains a picture, it will auto-populate it in the input fields for you. The same is true if you’re on a page with a video. And the bookmarklet makes it easy to share to Twitter and Facebook just by clicking checkboxes.

The TypePad Micro sites themselves will bring the most comparisons to Tumblr. After all, there is an easy, one-click re-blog button attached to each post, just as there is on Tumblr. And there is a way to “like” or “favorite” posts. And there is a social element that allows you to follow other TypePad users and showcase that on your site — which again, is like Tumblr. But unlike Tumblr, TypePad Micro is also a way to comment on each post. You can do so using a TypePad, Twitter, or Facebook account, or OpenID. In that regard, it’s more like Posterous.

So will people actually start using TypePad Micro over Tumblr or Posterous? If they don’t mind the lack of customization offered, they might. While most users are never going to do something like edit the CSS, it would still be nice to see more options for themes. That is definitely one strong-suit of Tumblr. Those may come down the road for TypePad Micro as well, we’re told.

One upside to TypePad Micro versus the others is that it’s built on TypePad’s own long-existing backbone, this makes the service is pretty fast. And thanks to Facebook Connect, setting up a new account takes just a few clicks and a few minutes before you’re ready to go.

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Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

As we reported a few days ago, Google had been planning to release at least part of Chrome OS this week. That still may be the case at this event, but it looks for now that the more complete launch will in fact take place next year. And if they are holding this event now with a “complete overview,” progress is clearly being made, so you can probably expect that launch to be early next year.

Google first announced Chrome OS in July, but gave very few details about it. It seemed the idea there was more to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft, which was just about to announce its online free version of Office. In the subsequent months, interest has remained high for Chrome OS, but about all we’ve seen is what the OS’s browser may look like.

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I refuse to believe that Twitter is really trying to add your DM inbox/sent messages, and all those new retweet categories to the main stream like that. Unless they read my post the other day and decided to do the opposite. And what on Earth is up with those numbers? Why the hell do I need numbered tweets in my stream, this is not Sesame Street.

Twitter is scheduled to undergo maintenance today, but that’s not until 11 PM PT tonight. What is going on?

Update: Order has been restored, it was in fact a bug and not a completely awful new UI. Thank God.

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Developed by the guys at Big In Japan, ShopSavvy is an app that allows you to use your device as a portable barcode scanner. You point your phone’s camera at any barcode and it will read it, do a product look up, and give you information about the product, as well as where you can find it online or at nearby stores and for how much. Obviously, something like this is a window shopper’s dream.

And while you might think retailers may hate something like this, because it gives shoppers all of their competitors’ information, increasingly, they’ve been working with ShopSavvy to come up with ways to allow you to make buying in their stores even easier. And honestly, what are the retailers going to do anyway? All of this information is out there on the web, ShopSavvy just gives you easy access to it. Are they going to ban mobile phones in their stores? That’d be a great story for us if that were to happen.

So what took so long? Well, for a while, the iPhone lacked a key feature needed for the barcode scanner: A camera that had auto-focus. The iPhone 3GS gained that, and so the team should have been good to go. The plan was originally to release the app this summer, but a internal mix up involving a team member who had since departed registering the app to his iTunes account caused a delay (more on that here). After some back and forth with Apple, Big In Japan was finally able to get that resolved.

While it’s great to see this product on the iPhone, it is a little buggy right now. The main issue is that it’s hard to scan the barcodes properly. Big In Japan says a fix for that is coming shortly, based on what they’ve learned from beta testers, but keep that in mind when using the app for now.

My own tests confirm that it is a little hard to scan, but it seems to work most of the time. For example, I just scanned the protein bar I’m eating, and ShopSavvy pulled it up right away and gave me a pricing rundown. Nifty.

ShopSavvy is available for free in the App Store. Find it here. Also read about Big In Japan’s other big plan for the iPhone (100 apps in a year) here.

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Recurly, which is a startup itself, is entering private beta today. The core idea behind the service is simple: To make it simple for startups to be able to offer subscription-based services as an option. They provide an easy-to-use system with a nice user interace and good analytics that lays on top of the dealings that must be done between a payment gateway (such as Authorize.NET) and the startup.

There are a number of other services that offer such functionality but Recurly believes it can differentiate itself in two key ways. First, they do not get paid until you get paid. There are no hidden or monthly fees here. Recurly takes a percentage of each transaction. These total anywhere from 1 to 3 percent depending on volume. But it also doesn’t take the money each time you make a sale, instead it collects the money at the end of each month when the sales are done.

Recurly’s other big selling point is the ability to offer customers a way to easily upgrade or downgrade service plans. What this means is that if an end user decides they want to switch to a lower-tier pricing structure for a service, Recurly can handle that seamlessly. While we may not think that is that big of a deal, it’s a huge headache on the backend for most companies to deal with, according to co-founder Isaac Hall.

And “seamless’ is probably the key word for everything Recurly is trying to do. If you’re a very young startup and don’t even want to deal with APIs, you can come to the site and set up a payment form widget in a few steps, for example. Or maybe your site requires a bit more customization. There are APIs available to you that still hook into Recurly’s system and give you the same kind of data and analytics that you would get with the simple widget.

So who is the main target? Primarily SaaS clients, co-founder Tim Van Loan tells us. He thinks this is a particularly exciting time for them, and really all sites that want to use a “freemium” business model. And realizing the so-called “app economy” is currently exploding, he sees that area in Recurly’s future plans as well.

Of course, as I said, there is plenty of competition. One of the big players is Zuora. But for many young startups, they’re offering is too complex. And more importantly, it’s also expensive. A closer competitor may be CheddarGetter, a startup that launched out of the incubator SproutBox back in August. There are a number of similarities between the two, but the key difference is that while CheddarGetter charges a flat-fee (starting at $39 a month, but goes up as you grow), Recurly opts to use the transaction fees (which also rise as you grow). It’s simply two different ways of doing things. Recurly also says it is more enterprise-focused.

Another thing to watch for is what PayPal is now doing with its own APIs. But again, Hall is sure that the easy upgrade/downgrade type options are something that Recurly can offer that others won’t be able to easily match. Plus, he notes that they work with PayPal as one of the payment gateway options.

Up until now, Recurly has been in a very small closed alpha test with a handful of customers. Today marks the launch of their slightly more open, but still closed beta.

Recurly is also announcing that David Samuel, the co-founder of Freestyle Capital, and founder of Spinner and Crackle, will be joining their board of advisors.

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As you can see in the screenshot, both the Google Mail Checker and (Chromium) BuildBot Monitor are up and running in a new build of Chromium. In fact, they’re even working on the latest builds of the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which just got updated tonight as well (they weren’t working with the previous build). The one other sample extension, “Subscribe in Feed Reader” doesn’t appear to be working yet on Macs, but images posted earlier by Google Operating System indicate that this is working on Chromium builds for Windows. To find all of these sample extensions, go here.

Installing these extensions is a breeze. You click the “Install” link, the file downloads, you click to run it, it asks if you’re sure you want to install the extension, you say “yes”, and you’re done. There is no need to restart Chrome/Chromium, they work right away.

The Google Mail Checker is particularly useful since it is badged with a number to show you exactly how many unread Gmail messages you have without having to have it open. Clicking on the icon launches Gmail in a new tab. Likewise, the Chromium BuildBot lets you know if there’s a newer version to download.

Of course, there have been a number of unofficial Chrome extensions that have worked for a while with the browser (Xmarks has a good one, for example), but it’s good to see some real ones rolling out, even if they are just samples for now. More importantly, neither seem to slow down the browser at all, which has become a major problem with Firefox extensions. Hopefully they can keep it that way.

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Here are a few of the bigger UI changes: As you can see in the screenshot, there’s a new set of horizontal tabs to better filter content. Xobni is also now surfacing links exchanged between contacts for the first time — previously, there was just a way to do this for files exchanged. Also new, the Twitter extension element now includes a direct message (DM) option. LinkedIn support has been improved, as has some of the analytics.

There are a half dozen or so other enhancements to the client such as extensions now being resizable, and better drag and drop support. There’s also finally a way for users to easily open a folder that emails reside in. Basically, if you’re addicted to Xobni, there’s a lot of little tweaks (and some bigger ones) to try out.

But again, the big news is that Xobni is opening premium extensions to users — and not just business users, all Xobni users. If Xobni is able to effectively convince users to buy these (as well as get more beyond just Salesforce), it could be a decent new revenue stream for the company. Back in July, the company introduced ‘Xobni Plus’, the premium version of their product. Revenue streams can be addicting when turned on, it seems.

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