Gillmor Gang Videos
newest 100 gillmor gang videos / gillmor gang widgets / media rss:

Steve Gillmor chats with Chris Messina about GNIP and the politics of micro-objects with Doc Searls and Robert W. Anderson. Recorded Wednesday, July 2, 2008.

Mike Vizard and Steve Gillmor discuss Enterprise Twitter. Recorded on Tuesday, July 1, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Dana Gardner, Robert W. Anderson, Dan Farber, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded Monday, June 30, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Robert Anderson, Doc Searls, Marc Canter, Loren Feldman, Mike VIzard, Sam Whitmore, and Jason Calacanis. Recorded Friday, June 27, 2008.

A conversation with Dan Farber. Recorded Monday, June 23, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Jon Udell, Robert Anderson, Marc Canter, and Mike Arrington - welcome back Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich. Recorded Friday, June 20, 2008.

A special one-on-one as Steve talks to a hospitalized Doc Searls, Gang member and friend, about his trials and tribulations with the medical community. Recorded Thursday, June 19, 2008.

A conversation with Mitchell Kertzman and Marc Canter. Recorded Thrsday, June 12, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, and Robert W. Anderson - talk Big 3 vendor sports. Recorded Wednesday, June 11, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Mike Vizard, Loren Feldman, and Marc Canter - discuss iPhone 3G, Android, and the rest of the mobile media market. Recorded Tuesday, June 10, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Mike Arrington, Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, and Robert Scoble - go 3G with Steve Jobs iPhone 2 announcements. Recorded Monday, June 9, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Dan Farber, Jason Calacanis, Doc Searls, Robert W. Anderson, ad Mike Vizard - welcome Google s Mark Lucovsky to talk about cloud computing from Hailstorm to today s Feed API s and beyond. Recorded Friday, June 6, 2008.

Chris Messina and Bob Lee join the Gillmor Gang s Dan Farber and Dana Gardner for more Plan B. Recorded Wednesday, June 4, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Gabe Rivera, Cliff Gerrish, Robert Scoble, and Marc Canter - talk Plan B and the Track endgame. Recorded Tuesday, June 3, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang talks with FriendFeed co-founders Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit. Recorded Friday, May 30, 2008.

Mike Vizard, a listening Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor talk Google I/O with Chris Messina. Recorded Thursday, May 29, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang meshes with NewsGang - Mike Vizard, Robert Scoble, Francine Hardaway, Matt Terenzio, Rob La Gesse, and Jerry Schuman and the UstreamGangers. Recorded Tuesday, May 27, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Robert W. Anderson, Dana Gardner, and Marc Canter - welcome Google Director of Engineering David Glazer to talk about Friend Connect and next week s Google I/O developer conference. Recorded Friday, May 23, 2008.

Mike Arrington and Danny Sullivan debate Microsoft s new Cashback strategy with Hugh MacLeod. Recorded Thursday, May 22, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Gabe Rivera, Dana Gardner, Marc Canter, Mike Vizard, Robert W. Anderson, and Hugh MacLeod - talk search and people search. Recorded Wednesday, May 21, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Sam Whitmore, Marc Canter, Dana Gardner, Mike Arrington, Mike Vizard, and Robert Scoble - collide over data portability and media convergence with self-invited guest Chris Saad. Recorded Friday, May 16, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Robert Scoble, Mike Arrington, Dana Gardner, and Robert W. Anderson - ask former Twitter architect Blaine Cook about Twitter internals including the valuable Track feature. Google engineer Bob Lee joins again. Recorded Thursday, May 15, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, and Jason Calacanis - savor ComCast/Plaxo, Friend Connect, and the Mesh metabolism. Recorded Wednesday, May 14, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, Mike Vizard, and Loic Le Meur - talk Friend Connect and the Enterprise. Recorded Tuesday, May 13, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Loic Le Meur, Marc Canter, Dan Farber, and Dana Gardner - welcome Cliff Gerrish in Part III of Decentralizing Twitter? Recorded Monday, May 12, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Marc Canter, Robert W. Anderson, Dana Gardner, Doc Searls, and Mike Vizard - decentralize Twitter with Chris Saad, Bob Lee, and Loren Feldman. Recorded Friday, May 5, 2008. Transcript [music] Gillmor: Yesterday we had a wide-ranging discussion about a number of things Twitter-related. Friend Feed, etcetera, with Scoble and Jason Calcanis and Mr. Canter, who was on that call as well. That call ended rather abruptly, but I wanted to continue what we were talking about, which had moved into a topic that I d talked with Mike Arrington and Chris Saad about as a result of Mike Arrington s post recently. I believe it was in the middle of the week, regarding Dave Weiner s commentary on decentralizing Twitter. And in the research for the show, I ve noticed that Dave and Marc have had a bit of an interchange about this as well on Marc s sight. Canter: Absolutely. Gillmor: So I want to start with Marc Canter. Could you define what we were talking about at the end of the show yesterday, your concerns about well, can you define what your concerns are? And then we ll go from there. Canter: Sure, no problem. What we ve got is a situation where the latest, hottest trend in this case, Twitter has positioned itself as infrastructure that many different apps and services can be built on top of it. That s one of the things Dave Weiner has done and many others have done. And at that time when this happened, it was about a year ago, I cautioned that if you guys start committing to a platform that in itself is great and don t get me wrong, Twitter is a wonderful platform but it s provided by one vendor. It is controlled by Evan Williams and Tread Wilson and the people who funded it. Now, we know that their end game is to sell the platform for a lot of money. And eventually it will end up in the hands of one of these big cos. Right. But the challenge here and Steve Gillmor s pointed out all the wonderful, incredible things that can be done with Twitter. It seems like my job to be the naysayer and say, Look, I love Twitter, whatever. But there could be technically 100 Twitters, each controlled by different vendors, and we could have a backend kind of DNS thing to federate users. So if I registered with Pownce or Jaiku, my handle would work on Twitter, or vice-versa. And that s what I ve been saying. Now, Dave Weiner s approach is a little different. I don t believe he necessarily supports that approach. Dave, of course, can correct me. I think what he s more about is, let s back up the data that s flowing over Twitter and put that in a place where that would connect us to data. Because I think Dave is thinks it s too idealistic to think that we could get DNS federation of 100 different Twitters, but right now he is backing up the data. [laughs] So that s the two different approaches I think that are on the table. And of course what we were talking about yesterday on the call was, this is all bullshit and who the hell cares about Twitter? Or, just leave them alone or whatever. Get on with the next one, guys. Gillmor: Who are you characterizing there? Canter: I couldn t even remember. I can t remember who s Gillmor: Are you saying you don t care? Canter: Oh, no. I absolutely care. Gillmor: OK. I don t know that there was anybody that was saying that they didn t care. All right, now and it was in that context and, again, we re representing what Dave Weiner has to say about this. I m not in touch with Dave Weiner directly, because he blocked me several weeks ago, and hasn t really been maintaining any kind of communication with me other than a piece of email that he sent last night, which seemed to be more a statement rather than any kind of conversation. So he has a lot to say about this subject, had been saying it for a long time. And the best we can do, I think, is to try and represent what he has to say. If anybody wants to signal him on various transports and suggest that he come on the show, he d be more than welcome. But in any case, regardless of whether he shows up or not, we re going to talk about this. So, Chris Saad, could you sort of detail the genesis of the conversation that you had with Mike Arrington, and how that led to the post on TechCrunch that Mike put up a few days ago? Saad: Sure. There was obviously a little bit of buzz on the blogosphere from Dave Weiner and others, who was saying that Twitter was going up and down like a yoyo, and it was one vendor, and there should possibly be a decentralized version and how would that look like, and that sort of thing. [00:05:08] Mike and I were discussing that, and I had mentioned to him that actually in my team in my company at Faraday Media, we had just been thinking and talking about that as a thought experiment for the last year. For no other reason, just to think about how our technology could be lent to that ecosystem while still making it open standards and something that anyone could play and participate in. And the result of that was to use existing sort of patterns of behavior that we saw on the Web and just adding very small layers of thinking to it. So I don t really think that the solution is all too complicated. I think that we could just look at the blogging ecosystem and literally just think about is as micro-blogging with a real-time component. And this is something that me and my team have come up with, so it s not all my idea, but the idea that if you created a WordPress type app that limited your post to 140 characters, then you re producing what is effectively micro-blogs. How that differs from Twitter is, A) it s real time, and B) there s an SMS gateway. So the real-time component Twitter itself uses this we could use XMPP, but the trick is XMPP is a much tougher thing to code to and work out. So we actually internally at our company had built an RSS to XMPP bridge. So you would just create and RSS feed, you would register it with this service, and every time you update the RSS feed, you just ping this service. This is your own thing; you re running it on your own server. You ping it, and it would broadcast and XMPP ping or a Web Hook ping or any sort of notification with the change to all the registered clients that cared about it. So what you re doing is you re effectively just recreating you re just taking blogging, you re limiting it to 144 characters, and you re adding XMPP on top. And you ve got real-time micro-blogging. Gillmor: All right. So, Bob Lee, are you there? Lee: I m here. Gillmor: All right, so Bob just for the audience s information is an engineer at Google and the author of Trouble, which the utility and viral spread of which eludes me, but I m sure that it s very exciting. Right? Lee: Yep. Gillmor: Bob has been working with the Twitter API, I would imagine, correct? Lee: Correct. Gillmor: And do you also have a working knowledge at least for the sake of the audience here a working knowledge of the issues of XMPP and how that might be interacting between the Google GTalk gateway and Twitter? Lee: Yes. Gillmor: OK. So can you unpack what Chris just said in the context of what we think Dave Weiner s talking about with from what I can understand basically taking an RSS and using it as transport for the Twitter messages? Lee: I think Dave Weiner s just biting off a small piece right now. Gillmor: OK. You re going to have to speak up a little bit. It s hard to hear you. Lee: OK. I think Dave Weiner s just starting off by biting off a small piece. And I think that s probably a good approach. He s only taking care of the backup aspect right now, right? Is that correct? Canter: Yeah. Lee: He s not really tackling the real-time kind of part, which you guys were talking about. Canter: Not at all. Gillmor: Who s saying, Not at all. Canter: Me. Marc. Gillmor: Thank you. Just trying to help the transcribers a little bit. If you can say who it is when you state something. Canter: Sorry. I ll be the guy blurting out. Gillmor: I m just saying to everybody. Just say who it is so that we can help ease the transcribers later on. Saad: This is Chris here. I just forgot to mention that that would obviously move a lot of the work of bringing the stream back together to the aggregator. I forgot to mention that piece, and very much like in the blogging ecosystem, now you need Google Read or NewsGator or whatever. You need to rely more on the Twirls of the world to then be XMPP listeners, to subscribe to each micro-blog you care about and aggregate it in. Which I don t think is a problem. I think that s exactly how it should work and how everything else works. So, yeah, I just forgot to mention that piece. Gillmor: All right. So, Bob, do you think, yes, incrementalism is always better than some sort of boiling of the ocean, correct? Lee: It s a good way to get things done. But it is fun to we do still need to talk about where we think we need to go. [00:10:04] Gillmor: My concerns with Dave Weiner s suggestions is that no matter how you frame it, it still comes down to in the case of initial suggestions it comes down to a server that he s going to contribute to capture this data, and then move it around the network. Why is that any less centralized than what Twitter s doing? Lee: It gets away from a single point of failure at least. Gillmor: Yeah. But I mean, as to the point Lee: It s not the ultimate solution, though. You re right. Gillmor: And to the point that Chris just made, Twirl, for example, is already doing this and so are a number of other services. I mean, Friend Feed is capturing all the Twitter streams and moving them around the network as well. So I m just not sure what Saad: Yeah, I don t think backup is necessarily the problem right now. Canter: This is Mark. If you re going to incrementally approach the problem, you take on piece at a time. So that particular piece that David s done is backup. That s perfectly reasonable. It s just that we want a distributed thing, and I think what Steve is saying is, Hey, we re already distributed anyway, what s the big deal? I think the point is that in a distributed world, in an open meshed world, there s going to be multiple paths to the same direction. If Robert Scoble wants to Gillmor: No, there s no dispute about that. There s no dispute about that, Marc. Canter: OK. So let s get back to Gillmor: The issue from my perspective about that, being able to express the desire to decentralize is certainly a laudable goal. And the more end points that are in the mix, that are not under the control of one business, the better. But beyond that, what exactly are people proposing. I still don t understand what Chris is talking about in terms of taking this RSS feed which by definition, as far as I can tell, is a store and forward approach, therefore it s much more latent than the XMPP approach that is currently being used by Google to push a real-time stream of Twitter messages. Which I consider to be the most interesting and useful expression of the Twitter stream. Anderson: Steve, this is Robert Anderson. Gillmor: Yeah. Anderson: I think we just need to separate the two issues of Dave Weiner wanting to have some kind of a backup system at this stage and whether that s incrementalism or not. And the bigger issue that I think most Twitter people have is that it s not up all the time. And those are two completely different things. The backup part, I think isn t very interesting. I certainly understand very well the issue of being able to get your data out of the system and have it be there when you want it, but that s completely separate from it being up for us to host or update. Saad: And different from trying to build a distributed version of Twitter. They re not the same thing. Anderson: Right, yes. But we go into the up time issue and being able to post our updates, and we can separate that out into what can we do to get Twitter to be up, or what can we do to instead of Twitter in terms of having a distributed system with different protocols or something that replaces it. I think that when we talk about completely different systems for it, like the micro-blogging perspective that Chris Saad just told us, that s a different thing than Twitter all together. And that, to me, isn t incrementalism, that s replacing it. Canter: And wouldn t we be able to seamlessly, if we could, there would also be a technique of having different implementation of, let s call it a Twitter protocol or whatever it is, that uses XMPP as a real-time backbone and then would have DNS for registered users. So if you registered with Jaiku or Pownce, you could work and log in and work on any of these other ones. So if one of them went down, you would be able to use one of the other systems with your followers on a completely different system. If one of the ones went down. Isn t that possible? Gillmor: So Bob, do you think Bob? Bob? Lee: Yes. Anderson: Can I ask Marc a follow up question on that? Gillmor: No. I want to ask Bob to comment on what Marc just said. [laughter] Gillmor: Is that a viable solution? And given the current infrastructure, is that doable or even politically possible? Lee: The thing that s kind of running through my head, it sounds like we already kind of have a backup deal, to even post messages to friends. Gillmor: You have to speak up. It s just impossible to hear you. Lee: Sorry about that. We already have backups in the sense that you can post a friend sheet in Pownce and stuff like that, but they don t have this XMPP component, right? [00:15:09] Gillmor: Correct. Lee: They don t have the live component, the live messaging. Gillmor: And Twirl is in the process of building out just such an XMPP component. Lee: Are they building the server side or ? Gillmor: Yeah. They re tapping into the Jabber framework and are going to produce the same affect as what Google is currently doing. Lee: Oh, cool idea. So you ve got the real-time messages coming in. Gillmor: And the track functionality, which I think is the other key aspect of this network. Lee: Very cool. So it sounds like I agree with them that the issue is just like, where do the people that I follow get stored? How do I keep track of that. Gillmor: And the other issue that Marc is mentioning is that this so-called DNS exposure to the.. Saad: I have to disagree with Marc on that idea, in terms of I don t think it s actually that complicated. I think that it could look exactly like blogs look today, with and XMPP layer on top. So the idea that you need to register uses and have a DNS there, that s been handled for us already. It s called DNS. Every blog has a unique URL, and if you re blogging from a URL, then that s your unique identifier. And the blog already Gillmor: Chris, before you go too far down this road, Robert Anderson has basically suggested that what you re talking about is not an incremental approach, but rather a replacement. Saad: I m not saying that it s one or the other. But Marc s is a replacement as well. It s going one step further. And I don t think we need to go one step further. I don t think we need to rebuild the DNS system for the unique identifier, that s all. Canter: Can I weigh in here right now and respond to Chris? OK. Now, Chris, you know of this thing called MyBlogRoll? Saad: My Blog What? Rule? Gillmor: MyBlogLog? Canter: MyBlogLog, yes. Sorry. MyBlogLog. Saad: [laughs] Yes. MyBlogLog. Canter: Something with mayonnaise and ketchup. Now as some of us know from this phone call, before social networking, when one would create a blog roll on the side of their blog page, that was your online community. It was very loosely coupled, but many, many blog posts were written all about my community and my gutter in 2002 and 2003. And when social networking came along, it replaced blog rolls as the predominated way that people declared their friends and followers. And nowadays Twitter and Friend Feed have taken that to the next stage. But what you re mechanism that you re proposing doesn t handle is my list of friends and followers. Saad: Oh, I have an answer for you for that one as well. Canter: Beautiful, beautiful. Tell me. Saad: I actually proposed this a little while ago. I m not sure if I ever published it, but I proposed it in my own head, anyway. The idea was and I actually think this is much more scalable, it s much more truly representative of what s going on we have suggested and proposed a protocol called Get Pinged, which is a discovery mechanism for discovering an XMPP end point and how you would get notifications of updates, particularly pushed notifications. And it s at getpingd.com without the last e because we re all Web 2.0 here. So what I would suggest actually is in the ping, where you subscribe to notifications, you actually declare yourself at that point. So you would say you ve passed something along with the requests for the RSS feed or the update and you would pass along some identification. Just like FeedBurner and count how many people are reading a feed, the user can optionally pass along some ID with that ping, and then FeedBurner or whoever is managing your feed can display who pinged your feed in the last day. And that would actually be a much more accurate representation of who s actually following a feed. And it would be decentralized. You wouldn t need a new DNS and you wouldn t need a whole new infrastructure. So I think that s one way of solving it, is as you request the update, you leave a breadcrumb behind about who you are. Canter: But where s the persistent list of friends? Where is your list of friends? Where is that stored? Saad: The list of friends that you re tracking would be in the aggregator, just like it s a list of feeds you re reading. The list of friends to sort of display on your sidebar as bling Who s following me that would be tracked by FeedBurner of whatever is turning your RSS into XMPP. And it would Gillmor: So instead of having Twitter track who I m following, you re suggesting that Google do it? Saad: No, I m suggesting that an aggregator do it. Gillmor: FeedBurner is a Google service. Arrington: He s using FeedBurner as an example. Right? [00:20:05] Canter: Yeah. The followers become a dynamic list. It s only whatever you re looking at, at the time. Gillmor: All right. So, Doc Searls, are you there? Searls: Yeah, I m here. I just had my microphone twisted away. [laughs] So, I ve been listening. It s like really great radio. I was sort of feeling like I m listening to a really great public station. Gillmor: Well, it will get really great once somebody like me can understand about a tenth of it. Searls: [laughs] OK, here s a couple of interesting thoughts that may or may not be related. One is that I soon as I heard XMPP being involved in this, then other open stuff like SNTP and so on. It makes me happy because I don t want to see the kind of stuff Twitter does and Pownce does or that anybody does, sitting in anybody s silo. And some like the anti-silo guy and I mean, I was around the whole Jabber movement that XMPP came out of and I m glad to see it being applied in places like this, even though it s still not universal in the area where it was intended in the first place, which is instant messaging which is still highly siloed. So, if what Twitter and Pownce do best can operate inside a larger market that has a name other than their brands, that would be really cool. I ve been sitting here trying to think, what s a name for that? Is it 140ing? Or something like Gillmor: I think it s called fantasy. Searls: No. I mean, if this is a category of activity on the net, you ought to have a name for what it is. Like, mail has a name and instant messaging has a name and blogging has a name. I don t think it ought to get tied up in just one implementation of something, right? I had a really interesting conversation with somebody in Toronto yesterday. And he s involved, he s got a company. I m not going to say what it is, but a couple of his programmers are committers on WordPress and we talked about bringing outlining to blogging, which is something I ve always wanted. I mean, I ve wanted a real outlining to come to blogging for a long time. There s a part of it with OMPL, but I want it to work like IncTec or more work. I ve always wanted that to happen. I ve wanted that to happen in word processing as well. Gillmor: So, the reason that I I know you ve been lurking for a while here and feel free anytime just to go back and listen. Searls: Yeah. Gillmor: The reason I wanted to bring you in here is just that I always see this dichotomy between what should be or what we all think should be the way things work. And the way things work, I m not trying to debunk the notion that Well, I m actually trying to debunk the notion, but that s what this is for. So, I think it s an absolute nonsense. Searls: [laughs] Gillmor: But let s say, for a second, since everybody else on this call seems to think that it s important, that it s a laudable goal. On the other hand, we re faced with this utility that are what people call this proprietary service that has outstripped by far its original goals and its utility for many of us like me, it s taking up 78% of my time. Searls: This utility being Twitter? Gillmor: Yeah. Searls: OK. Gillmor: I mean, Twitter is, to me, the dominant service on my machine at this point. Searls: Oh. Gillmor: It has been for several months. Searls: It takes about half of 1% of my time. Gillmor: I understand. Canter: Can I say something? Can I say something here? Searls: I want to hear Steve finish. Canter: All right. Go ahead, Steve. Gillmor: Who was that? Was that Chris? Canter: My name is Marc. No, this is Marc Canter. Gillmor: Oh, I m sorry, Marc. Go ahead. Believe me, we ll keep talking. Canter: I think we have a unique opportunity with somebody like Doc who doesn t use social networking, who doesn t use Twitter, but yet is very much a leader in this area. And when I thought of Facebook, when I looked at the open platform of Facebook, I felt it was an incredible step forward and it went 98% of the way to nirvana, right? And that last 2% where they retained control over the user s data is what makes this type of closed platform. You can have an open platform for developers to come in and to monetize, but if they re locking that user s data, they haven t gone far enough. Gillmor: Marc, you could also make the case that that lock-in which I don t agree exists, but let s say that it does that it s spawned I know you two both agree vehemently about this. I mean, trying to get you to use Facebook for any purposes whatsoever, I ve long since given up on. [00:25:15] Searls: I hate it, I really hate it. I have to say. Gillmor: I understand that and I m not going to argue that point. What I am going to say is just that if that is what it has done to retard its approach to nirvana, at the same time, it incentivized what Twitter has accomplished. Twitter just drove through that hole and created this enormous leverage. Searls: Yeah, but it s still, to me, Facebook versus Twitter at a certain level, and I ll be the total broken record on this, is still vendor sports. I think Facebook and Twitter both prototyped something that needs fundamentally to be open and should have big backend utilities in the Nick Carr sense of that word, doing them better than anybody else does. Just like search is open. I mean, nobody owns search. Anybody can do a search. Google has to do better. Gillmor: You ve got to be kidding me. You ve got to be kidding me, that search is open. Searls: Why would I kid you? Why would I kid you? Just to [laughs] Gillmor: Just to be Doc Searls, I think. Searls: [laughs] Canter: Doc, people would say that Google owns search, right? Searls: Well, the reason that Google owns search is because the competition is lame and weak and stupid. That s why. And chicken shit. Gillmor: I don t think that Searls: That s why they own search, it s by default. For God s sake! It s by default. Canter: Can we go back to Twitter for a sec? Gillmor: It s by acquiescence on the part of millions of people. Searls: Acquiescence on the part of their competitors as well. Google succeeded because Microsoft and Yahoo and other people in that space failed. Gillmor: Human aggregates Searls: And that s the full credit to Google for doing what it does well. OK? I m not saying Google is bad Canter: It s not on purpose, it didn t purposely fail. Searls: And I don t hate Google, by the way. I like Google. Canter: It didn t purposely fail. It didn t purposely fail, it s not their choice. Searls: Sure. Gillmor: We aggregate around what somebody called standards at the beginning of this show. We aggregate around these things. Searls: Who aggregated around what standards? Gillmor: What? Searls: Who aggregated around what standards? Gillmor: People do, and people like I mean, I aggregated around Office because I was sick to death of trying to figure out what the balance of power was between Ami Pro and WordPerfect and Word and all that kind of crap. But at some point, I said, Hey, this one s better. This one s good enough. It s cheaper. Yes, it s going to create a dominant position for Microsoft. So be it. I m going to buy it. Searls: Right. And that s fine. So what? What s your point? Gillmor: Well, my point is just that that s what s happening with Twitter right now. Searls: Oh sure. But that s what happened to MySpace and it s what happened to a bunch of things. But it s not the end of time for any of those or with Google, so Gillmor: No, but to say that we all are trending toward I mean, the Republican philosophy is just that the market will decide and as much as I m in favor of Obama and the Democrats, I actually agree with that scenario, which is that the market tends to even out the bumps along the road toward innovation. Searls: Sure. Gillmor: OK. So, I don t see what the problem is here. Decentralization is a laudable goal. It s also science fiction. Searls: Well, it s both. Gillmor: There s no decentralized solution because it s not going to have a control point, be definition. Searls: Well, essentially it s just that you have many, many more control points. I mean, the net itself in 1984 would have been absolute science fiction. But now, it s not. Gillmor: I agree. Searls: There are lots of control points, but they re different control points. There s no one company running the control points. Gillmor: We have many control points. We have lots of control points right now. Frenzy is a control point, Twirl is a control point. What Dave Weiner is proposing is a control point. They re all control points. To be able to suggest that one of these ideas or solutions has some sort of endowment of credibility from a kumbaya perspective I think is bullshit. Searls: OK. Well, what makes you think I m thinking a kumbaya perspective? Gillmor: I don t. I m attacking the world, not you personally. Searls: OK. I ll step aside for the world and let them take the hit. Canter: OK, I would like to sing Kumbaya first and I would like to say that Chris Saad s proposal sounds totally coolio. That anything Google comes up with, it can mesh in is totally coolio. And we love Microsoft and Yahoo, we want them to mesh in. OK? Evan Williams ain t going away, and Loek Essers. Everybody is going to mesh in. And that s all we are talking about, - having different channels. And may the best brand and the best compelling experience win. That s all. [00:30:00] Gillmor: That s what s happening. Yeah, sounds good. Saad: I don t really think what I am proposing is actually radical or amazing or science fiction. I think it is a very, very simple logical extension of what s already happening. Micro-blogging is very popular, and all I am saying is look at what is micro-blogging at it s fundamental core. It s blogging with a sense of real-time on top and with some SMS gateways on top. If we standardize the way that works, then others can implement it as well. That s all. Gillmor: So, in other words, there is no problem? We don t have to worry about anybody in this space? Everything is fine? Lee: Do we really need to even standardize as yet? Is there anybody that is really interested and doing the same thing as Twitter right now? Gillmor: The only person who seems to be suggesting it is Dave Weiner. He is talking about contributing the server to be able to capture the RSS feeds, or convert the stream of Tweets into an RSS stream. It sounds like where Chris is talking about as applying, now that the work has been done, to take an RSS stream and convert it to XMPP. That s one approach. The other approach is to be able to bootstrap the existing XMPP gateway, as I call it. And that s the approach that I believe Twirl is doing. Saad: Great. I think better not. Gillmor: I want to hear what Bob has to say, please. Lee: I think we are not talking about technical problems here. What I need is a way to say, Steve Gillmor, I want you to broadcast your updates to me. And also, on top of that, I think I also might want some way to make that anonymous. So I can just stop receiving your updates, so you can t spam me. Does that make sense? Gillmor: Well, it would make sense if I could hear you. Lee: Is there any way to make my handset louder? Canter: It did make sense. Gillmor: Press * for one more time. Lee: Star what? Gillmor: One more time. Lee: Does that help at all? Gillmor: Look, it is good enough for me because I am going to compress the hell out of the show. So we ll be able to hear it. Lee: I guess the problem for me is that, yeah, I just need some way to tell Steve Gillmor that I want you to start broadcasting the updates, and like RSS, I kind of want that relationship to be anonymous, so that I can just stop following you whenever, and not get spammed. Gillmor: Alright, so what is it that happens now and what s the difference? Lee: Really, I guess I need some service that s maybe tied to your OpenID or something like that, where I can just go and add or remove myself. When I say add or remove myself, I guess there has to be some kind of intermediate thing, almost kind of like anonymous email address or something like that. You know what I am saying? Gillmor: No, what I am asking is that right now Twitter exists, and what happens on Twitter? Just model this with the current technology and then what you are trying to do, so we can determine what the delta is between the two ideas. Yeah, so what happens right now with Twitter? Lee: Right now, with Twitter, I follow you that Twitter controls the point of it takes your updates and broadcasts simply. If I lose you, then I don t receive your updates anymore. But if we try to decentralize this, and I just kind of subscribe to you, how do I tell you that I want to receive your updates? How do I tell you that I want you to broadcast to me? Saad: Sure it s simple. Why is that any different to an RSS subscription? I am not clear on that. Lee: Well, RSS is pulling. We need something that Saad: Which is what I am saying. You wrap RSS in an XMPP notification. Gillmor: But that doesn t make sense. Lee: That doesn t solve the problem. Saad: Why not? Gillmor: Because you put it into RSS, which is a polling mechanism, which introduces latency, and then you put it on an XMPP transport which ratifies the latency of RSS. Saad: There are ways what I am saying is, everyone understands the Gillmor: Is there a streaming RSS format that you are aware of? Saad: Actually, there is. The way Google does it. They have this sort of open connection to the RSS, and they are constantly reading it. And that s how 6-Apart updates them so quickly. Lee: Actually, RSS is just a format. It doesn t really have anything to do with Saad: Yeah, that s what I am saying. Lee: RSS is more than a format. [00:35:04] Gillmor: And I am going to make sure that if I don t understand this, then I am going to stop you guys until I understand it. I am going to be proxy for the audience here. Saad: All I m saying is Gillmor: Hang on, Chris. What I understand about RSS, forget about what it is called, is that I can subscribe to it and then from that point on, receive information as it is updated. Now, there is an interval between the time that I polled the last time for RSS, and then the next time that I poll for it. Right? That is a common form of RSS aggregation. To me, that has a tremendous amount of latency involved in it, which is not interesting to me. Saad: Not only that, it doesn t scale. Gillmor: OK. So, Bob? Saad: But I am not suggesting that. Lee: I definitely agree with you on this. Gillmor: OK, good. So, what are you suggesting? Are you suggesting something, Chris, that avoids that limitation? Saad: For lack of a better word, I am suggesting push RSS. Gillmor: OK, and does that exist on plan? Saad: Well, it does as far as I am concerned. Because, it is simply RSS plus this little think stream thing that we wrote, which anyone else could write themselves. And you discover it using this open cross-standard way of proposing called getpingd. So, with those three things together, and none of which are proprietary because someone could write the proprietary bit themselves, for all we care, it turns polling of RSS into pushing of RSS. RSS is simply the payload. You just forget the fact that you poll it right now. It is just a way of describing the data. But you can turn it into a push mechanism. It is very easy. Gillmor: OK. Bob? Bob, is that accurate? Lee: Well, just being able to push it isn t the issue. I am talking beyond that. I want to be able to tell you to be able to push it to me. I don t necessarily want you to know who I am, and I want to be able to stop you from pushing it to me. And right now we have Twitter as that kind of control point. You are not sending instant messages directly to my GTalk account. You are sending them to Twitter and then Twitter is re-broadcasting it. So we have that control point. Saad: Why can t the aggregator be the control point? Gillmor: Robert Anderson, could you answer that question? Anderson: Well, yeah. What Chris Saad is saying is, why can t there be multiple aggregators. Right? Saad: That s all I am saying. Anderson: Right. But the fact that it is RSS, I think, is irrelevant. I don t see why we are saying that. With RSS, you can just subscribe to it or not. It doesn t matter that it is RSS. As you said, Chris, it is just the payload. It doesn t matter how it is described internally. Lee: Exactly. Gillmor: OK, I understand that. If you look at the way Microsoft describes Mesh, they have a dropdown menu that supports a number of different payloads for the data RSS, Atom, JSON, on and on. Saad: Precisely. Gillmor: OK. So, again, what I am looking for is a real-time, or so real-time that it appears real-time to me. I don t care whether it really is real-time. I don t think anything is real-time. There is always the delta between something happening and something being received. Anderson: Real-time is a greatly bastardized term. Gillmor: I understand. But it is like you can tell you would know it when you see it. And right now the only place I see it is on the Google GTalk gateway. Something that looks like that, that also, from what we are talking about here, has the additional capabilities of granularity around essentially the social graph aspects of it; which is what Bob is talking about, I think also Marc is talking about. Correct? Canter: Yeah. Gillmor: OK. So, any of the technologists here want to tell us how that could be modeled, so that we can move forward? Lee: Well, actually, I do have some ideas in that regard too I mean, the spam is already been solved to some extent with IRC. Unlike the IRC model, is that you have networks. You can think of like our whole micro-blogging area is a network. But there are tons of servers and each server has a certain number of connections or certain number of users connected and all those servers kind of broadcast all the messages to each other. [00:39:56] So you could conceivably think about some other service that is just like Twitter and that provides all the same features, kind of we are talking about the XMPP broadcasting and maybe even the SMS gateway, maybe even some other stuff that we haven t even thought of, but if something was going to happen and then that service and Twitter, I would think it is really simple, would just have a pipe in between the two, right? Gillmor: Right. Saad: I do think that you could go with the IRC model and have Twitter service, for lack of a better word, but I don t think IRC is the perfect model to look out. I also said before I think blogging is the perfect model. Lee: I don t understand. Saad: Well with blogging, you don t need to go through a server, you go straight from the provider to an aggregator; you don t need a server in the middle. Gillmor: First of all that is not true, every blog has a server. Saad: No, I am sorry, the server is the blog, where the blog is sitting and then you have an aggregator, but what Lee: I agree that s a simpler model than XMPP, but it doesn t provide kind of like the efficient real-time in which Saad: Hang on, I am not saying that is instead of XMPP, I am saying it is instead of having an IRC server type model where you have like a relay server in the middle. I am saying you could have a server that hosts the blog, that server itself has a little XMPP engine on it and it pings all the subscribers when you update your blog. And the subscribers are aggregated. Lee: So you are talking about like you are going to send me a message and tell me that you updated and I am going to go download your update? Saad: You could do it that way, or you could actually send the update in the ping. Lee: Right, so that doesn t solve the other problem that we were talking about, in fact I want to be able to leave you and not receive your ping any more. Saad: Then you unsubscribe from your aggregator. Lee: And you are talking about the aggregator is just a service like Twitter right? Saad: No, the aggregator is a service like Twirl. Lee: It is running on my desktop? well I am still receiving it, you are still spamming me, I mean Saad: No. Lee: And you want to see the network traffic, I don t understand. Anderson: About the aggregator, Chris, it was more the getpingd service, whatever you call that. Saad: It is just like Google Reader, you subscribe to a blog or you subscribe to a feed or you subscribe to an XMPP notification or you subscribe to a Web Hook ping. You subscribe to it and then you get network traffic from the originating source. And if you don t want to get that data anymore, then you unsubscribe and it stops broadcasting to you. I don t understand where the complication is. Lee: Yeah, but I don t trust you to stop broadcasting to me. Anderson: Well that is why you have an aggregator, that s why it is not the blog that is going to Lee: I don t understand, then. Gillmor: Unpack what Bob said, because we ve had a number of examples in the last couple of weeks for people who do not respect the unsubscribe model. Saad: I missed all that. Gillmor: We have a number of examples of people who do not respect the unsubscribe model. Anderson: OK, but if your aggregator works for you, the subscriber, not for the publisher, then the aggregator can block whatever you want your aggregator to block, right? Saad: Exactly. Gillmor: OK, Robert, so go on. Anderson: So I mean I d like to go, we are talking about this instead of DNS, but when we talk about DNS I have been thinking about further how email works and now you have message exchanges, right? You have several MX records that say who is in-charge of delivering your messages. And I think this is sort of analogous to that where you say you have to tell the world, this is my aggregator, this is how I get my information and whether that is a Google service or someone else s service. Gillmor: That would be my point exactly, which is that at some point there has to be a centralized solution to Saad: I am arguing that is a flawed assumption and a flawed analogy. Gillmor: I know you are arguing it, but you haven t proven your case and I am hearing from Robert an example of why it is at some point you have to pay the piper, which is that there is going to be some controlling authority, whether or not it is controlling by on the basis of an algorithm, on the basis of a person. Saad: So who is the controlling authority in the blogging ecosystem? Gillmor: OK, let s talk about that, you want to really go down that road. Saad: Yes. Lee: Yes. Gillmor: Right now, Mike Arrington. Saad: [laughs] I am not talking about who is the most popular, I am talking about who controls the infrastructure of blogging. Gillmor: I am not talking about popularity, I am just talking about from the market has to some extent voted Arrington into a position of authority. If there is authority, that is where it goes. [00:45:02] Saad: We are talking cross purposes, Steve, I am saying who in the infrastructure of blogging that is publishing RSS using WordPress and are consuming RSS using Google Reader or any other product out there, who has got the controlling authority? Gillmor: Well, what was the ping server that was in the center of this 6-7 seven years ago? Saad: Weblogs.blog or something. Gillmor: .com, yes. Saad: .com, yeah. Gillmor: That s right. Saad: OK. So if you take that piece out of it and moved the pinging to the blog software using again an XMPP engine at the blogging software side, you are mimicking blogging except even taking the centralized pinging server out of it. Gillmor: OK. Hold that thought. Bob, is that a realistic concept? Lee: I didn t quite understand what he was saying to tell you the truth. I was just thinking about something. I think what we already need is already built into out instant messaging servers right, like you can change your status and broadcast your status and I can stalk you. Gillmor: Yes. Lee: Or I can make you a friend on the instant messaging server and I receive those status updates. So isn t it just kind of a matter of my IM client presenting me those status updates in a different way? Gillmor: Doc Searls, are you still there? Searls: Yeah. Gillmor: OK. Is this where Jabber came in? Searls: I will cop with Mike, I am sort of confused. So when you say this is where Jabber came in, what is the diff? Gillmor: What he just said, what Bob just said was, you want to repeat that? Lee: Yeah, everything we need is already on the server side in my Jabber server, like Steve can change his status and I will see that in my IM client if I made him a friend on the Jabber server. It is just a matter of instead of just putting the status next to his name, just give me a list of the statuses as they come in, in an IM window. Searls: Well, I guess those are obviously features of a Jabber sever, I am not sure how that comes up to all the need for but then again what need is may be different things to different people. Gillmor: Right now, I am trying to boil this down to a set of use cases that would satisfy everybody on this call. And right now, the only used case that hasn t been satisfied by what Chris has been talking about other than mine, which is that it is in no way real-time, is what Bob has been talking about, about notification and the ability to control on a point-to-point basis who can talk to who. Is that an accurate summary, Bob? Lee: That sounds exactly right. Saad: I actually like using the status updates, I actually like that idea because you are absolutely right, it exists and it works right now. Gillmor: And it would also Searls: Something different here though about Twitter and that is how the IMs are kind of inverted, right. And right now you can t just show up and start IMing me. Lee: Yeah, there was definitely a problem with that because like if I wanted to receive Steve Gillmor s status updates right now with the existing Jabber server, I would need to have his actual user name and then I would be able to send messages to him as well. Searls: Right, but he would also have to say that that was OK, right? Lee: That s true, yes. Searls: I mean that s a whole different model and that s just the things that is so interesting about the Twitter contract? Gillmor: What was that? Searls: The fact that you can follow someone and unfollow them and it is different from subscriptions of RSS. Gillmor: OK good. Searls: If we talk about just how this is just like IM, we can just all use Jabber, then we are missing the big interesting use case and Saad: I disagree with that idea, why is that different to RSS? Why is subscribing to an RSS feed and then unsubscribing to it different from following and unfollowing? Canter: Because there is a persistent list of people that you are following. Searls: Besides that, I think there is a big Gillmor: One at a time please. Searls: The big difference to answer that is I think that you can then go ahead and block people. You can t do that with RSS, not in any reasonable way. Saad: So you are saying blocking people from getting your updates. Searls: So, let s say I am wrong and they are exactly the same, how do you block them? Gillmor: No, you re not wrong, because Dave Weiner has blocked me and yet if I go to FriendFeed which is I believe polling through an RSS infrastructure, and is certainly making it available on RSS I can read Dave Weiners tweaks even though I am blocked. So that s a fact. That routes around the block mechanism. Saad: Well, blocking people from getting your updates we haven t raised that before. That s a completely different problem. Canter: It s a basic part of the Twitter service. Saad: I ve never actually blocked anyone. I don t know why you would want to block them in terms of [00:50:02] Gillmor: We could spend a whole show about this. Trust me, Chris, people block other people. And it pisses off people and it makes people happy. So it s something that is going to continue. Saad: You could still block people with Gillmor: The whole political infrastructure of the Twitter service and by that I mean it s like the election. There is going to be an election. The Electoral College may suck, but it s going to be how it s decided. Right now, Twitter may suck in terms of some of its implementations but it is how it is going to be decided for the conceivable short-term as far as I m concerned. Because I have no reason whatsoever to leave Twitter. Whatsoever. Saad: Yeah, but you don t necessarily have to leave Twitter wholesale. If you use Twirl, for example, Twirl could implement this. Gillmor: My only motivation, as I have said directly to everybody on these calls as well as to Loek and others is to incentivize Twitter to do the same thing that Loek is going to be doing. If they provide the same kind of filtering of track that is necessary, if they provide some sort of reasonable I ll put it another way. If they do not limit the XMPP access to their services in any way then I will continue to support them. If they were to shut down that capability Saad: Why would they? Gillmor: Then they would be in violation of what I consider to be my user contract, which is where I totally agree with everything that Dave and Mark and everybody else is saying, which is that we are liable to a single point of failure. Saad: Why would they shut down their XMPP stuff? It actually reduces load on their server because there is less client - Gillmor: I don t care why they would. I m saying if they did, that would be the only way that they could destroy their monopoly, if that is in fact what it is. Saad: They would never do that. Gillmor: I don t think so. I think they are smart people. And I don t think it s going to happen. Saad: It s not just about being smart. It s not in their interest in any way shape or form to do that. Gillmor: Right, because there will be a significant move away from their service to somebody else. Vizard: Can I ask a question at this point? Is there going to be more finesse in these services at some point, because as you continue to scale up on Twitter and I get to hundreds of people that I am following, I don t really care about who doesn t like what allergy pill? And I don t really care about who is having breakfast. So I m trying to figure out if this scales up and you try to manage it, is there going to be some way of finessing, either by keywords or traffic or something? Gillmor: Yes. That s exactly why the issue of the r

The Gillmor Gang - Mike Vizard, Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis, Marc Canter, and Robert W. Anderson - mesh it up on the road to Twitter. Recorded Thursday, May 8, 2008.

The Gillmor Gang - Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, Dana Gardner, and a lurking Mike Arrington - are joined by Redmonk analyst James Governor in a dissection of Sun Microsystem s consumer-driven enterprise strategy. Recorded Wednesday, May 7, 2008. Transcript Farber: [0:08] Hello. Gillmor: [0:09] Hello. Farber: [0:12] I have joined. Gillmor: [0:13] I am happy about that. Governor: [0:14] Hi Steve, this is James Governor. Gillmor: [0:17] James Governor? Governor: [0:19] How are you doing? Gillmor: [0:20] I am good. Dan Farber, you are there too, right? Farber: [0:24] Yes. Gillmor: [0:25] OK, so let s get started. OK, this is Steve Gillmor, welcome to the Gillmor Gang for Wednesday. This is a special edition, hopefully the start of some daily shows and we are going to talk about Sun Microsystems today. Dan Farber, what was your take on the conference today. Farber: [0:47] Well, I haven t attended that much of the conference, what I did see were mostly the keynotes and the highlight of the conference was Neil Young getting on stage and talking about his archive project that is using Java and Blu-ray to capture 45 years of his life and music, so that was cool. [1:07] But in the vendor sport arena, Jonathan Schwartz Cocaine on stage, JavaOne, that is right, isn t it? Farber: [1:42] I don t get the reference. Governor: [1:45] Well, it was just kind of funny, it is a very corporate environment and you are listening to Neil Young playing Cocaine, but it was just kind of interesting to hear that in the context of JavaOne frankly. Farber: [1:55] Yes, maybe that wasn t the best choice of songs for them. Gillmor: [2:01] I think that they do have a certain culture clash between I mean they seem to be wanting to leverage social media, but at the same time I think that social media has a tendency to get kind of messy and I don t know that they I mean I know for a fact that PR doesn t have a real handle on this yet. Farber: [2:24] Well, but just back to what they announced, they announced JavaFX and the idea there is, you d say well they are starting from zero, they don t have an installed base, but every machine, which is about 85% of cell phones and 90% of desktops and laptops, have Java installed. So getting JavaFX installed on these systems is simply a matter of just people clicking on the updates and they would get it, so that is pretty big advantage for them. [2:49] And the other was Project Hydrazine, which is their rocket fuel notion of building a cloud-based service that they say that is kind of a mashup between Amazon s Elastic Compute Cloud and what Google is doing with Analytics as well. So that is a pretty big change for them to say that they are going to go compete by building basically an infrastructure as a service play. Governor: [3:17] Well, they tried before, I mean there isn t anything necessarily new about that. I mean they Farber: [3:21] The big difference is that what they tried before was high-performance computing and trying to get a few startups, now they are really kind of going after by providing mail, storage, messaging, taking their whole communication stack, mashup tools and everything and really trying to become a developer platform for both developers and consumers. Governor: [3:40] Absolutely right. I mean I am just saying that I mean, hey, Sun s slogan for longer than anyone else, The network is the computer. So one would hope that the cloud was something they would be reasonably comfortable with. [3:51] I just want to say a little bit about the Neil Young. I mean from my perspective and I was blown away and I think one thing that we may not all realize is that actually he called them. So this was not like them calling Sony and saying, Hey dude, have you got somebody that can kind of bring us some credibility. [4:11] This was Neil Young saying, Look, it has been a labor of love for many years and I am really impressed with this Blu-ray thing and thanks guys, and actually went and did that. So I was certainly impressed and something about that as well. [4:21] I got to tell you I have been going to JavaOne now for, well longer than I would like to admit. I mean I guess we are talking 10 in fact maybe even a little bit longer than that years. And I have never once at the end of a keynote left going, You know what, I have to buy something, I must buy something, and that was what I came away with, because I think and not just for me, I think I am buying my dad a PS3 and Neil Young s life works. So you know that was kind of interesting, JavaOne driving an interview before purchasing decision. Gillmor: [4:54] Obviously, the Neil Young aspect of this conference was, to say the least, exciting, sort of being in line with what has been going on in the whole social media space, but the fact that you are going to buy a PS3 actually trends more towards the notion, which I think Jonathan Schwartz has been sort of promulgating, which is that there is a connection now that they are finally realizing between this and I don t mean HE has been finally realizing this. Jonathan has been ahead of this for four or five years actually. They are realizing as a company now the potentials for harnessing the consumer space as a driver for the enterprise. Governor: [5:45] I just hope that begins to be reflected in the revenues, because I think it is an interesting strategy. I could remember asking Scott McNealy and this goes back probably again like seven years or so and I said, You know, you have got a consumer strategy without realizing it. And he was like, No, we don t do consumer. But what about all these phones? [6:05] I think Jonathan, the opposite is true. Jonathan has been always very very aware that what matters is volume. Now the question is are they making enough money because I wasn t going out to buy some Sun stuff, I was going out to buy PS3. So again, you need an awful lot of volume if you are going to be making money on those kinds of margins, but certainly consumer does inform the enterprise. [6:28] I mean I think from that standpoint one of the interesting thing for me was, I was on the plane on the way out Sun flew me out, they paid my expenses, premium economy on Virgin, I used some miles, I went in upper class. Anyway, I meet this guy called Chris Ohms and he is one of the senior engineers on the Solaris engineering team. [6:54] And you know, he hands me this USB stick and a couple of minutes later, I am basically using OpenSolaris, the new version, which is actually really nice and I was using that as a laptop/desktop environment and playing with it. And actually I was very, very impressed with the slickness of it. [7:12] And because of a recent experience where Windows took 15 minutes to boot up and I wasn t able to do something I needed to do, I have been thinking that perhaps it is time to make this change. And while a lot of people went from Windows to Linux, I am seriously considering running OpenSolaris as a primary laptop operating system. Gillmor: [7:32] Well, you can have fun with that and check back with us later. Why don t you identify yourself, James, Dan just wants to know who you are. Governor: [7:40] Yeah, well this is James Governor from RedMonk. We are an industry analyst company. We give away most of our content. We call what we do open source analysis. The [...] is all peer readership. We have been pretty aggressive about the use of social media tools and again I think that we have got a real handle on open source and open source business models. [8:02] And so yeah, what are things about us, unlike some of my colleagues in other industry analysts firms, our policy is to disclose everything and I would also say that Sun Microsystems is a client of ours. And I think it is important that everyone knows that, just so they can turn the dial one way or another in terms of agreeing with or disagreeing with my analysis. Gillmor: [8:27] Dan Farber? Governor: [8:29] Virgin Atlantic International, sorry I am arriving at the airport here. So that is who James Governor is. Gillmor: [8:35] OK great. Dan Farber, what is your take on the last quarter [that Sun had and how it relates to what we are talking about here? Farber: [8:44] I think as James was saying, Sun has a fundamental problem that they have a great vision, but can they crank enough revenue. The whole idea is they have Java, they have all this other open source software now including MySQL, which basically provides the back plain for anybody building application. [9:03] The question is how does Sun make money, will they make it in two ways? One is by people buying subscription for support. And a lot of companies don t need it from Sun. And the second is by selling their infrastructure hardware and software. [9:18] And while the demand for compute resources and all the things that they build is growing, they apparently are not intercepting enough demand especially in the United States. Governor: [9:32] I think there is still a dropping off of the old Sun. So as a business, we are seeing growth in some of the other lines but I completely agree with you. It is kind of how much do you actually have to turn the ship around, but also I think it is worth bearing in mind, you know, look we are seeing they had a lousy quarter and that was 0.5% drop in revenues while the week before Microsoft posted its own financial results and we saw, I think it was like, a 24% drop in Windows revenues. Well, what a lousy quarter? Gillmor: [10:09] Well, as one reporter noted, IBM went up in the same quarter. So they have been taking share on Smart Station the way Farber: [10:20] Yeah, the challenge for Sun right now is that they are in a big transition from their old businesses to their new business and their new business being, to be an infrastructure provider, both as an arms dealer I mean selling infrastructure to eBay and others as well as building their own infrastructure which is what this project Hydrazine and their Network.com service are about, because increasingly I think that Sun is going to follow the model that we are starting to see Amazon use, which is being an infrastructure service provider to anyone and try to do that more effectively and cheaply, and add high performance and flexibility. Governor: [11:06] Well, I see a change, and that s what this about. Yeah and again it is not exactly clear how those revenues are going to kick in. I mean the simple fact is that Amazon is having a great deal of success with its power computing, but you know, it is still not the kind of very significant revenues that are going to work. It might need the necessary effects on for example Sun s bottom line. Gillmor: [11:31] Mike Arrington, are you on the call? Arrington: [11:38] Yeah, I have been listening quietly the whole time. Gillmor: [11:41] All right, just so for the chat group, that was Mike Arrington who was complaining about the terrible audio. What we have got is an industry analyst who has been paid by Sun for his airfare on the way to the airport to go back to London and that is why the audio sucks. Governor: [12:02] Yeah, it is a timing thing and I am sorry about that, hopefully it will be a little bit quieter here in the airport, but it can t be guaranteed. If you want, I can drop off and come back in on a landline in about five minutes. Gillmor: [12:12] No, no, I appreciate you being here. I am sure everybody does. All I am saying is that let s just make do with the audio, the fact is that we have been get such interesting people in the same telephone conversation is a technical challenge and if you don t like it, then hang up. Arrington: [12:38] Hey, Steve or Dan, how do you think Amazon is hurting Sun, is Amazon s web services hurting Sun s market cap right now? Because every company I talk to, not just startups, have already started moving their data centers over to Amazon s web services and that has got to be affecting Sun if Sun is not able to sell Amazon any equipment? Farber: [13:08] Well, I think there is a couple of things here, Sun is selling Amazon equipment to run their service. So they make money on that end. And they just do the deal to bring OpenSolaris onto that platform. And secondarily I think Sun has been focused on much higher performance, you know, four or five 9s, not the kind of two 9s or three 9s that Amazon can deliver. [13:31] So they are different market space, but I definitely that Sun is going to be headed toward that middle ground where they are going to try to be all things to all developers. Gillmor: [13:42] The problem that I have been having with Sun for quite a while is that they seem to be like one of those three-card monte guys on the streets of New York. It s like, or the pea, which one, where is the pea? Is it under here? No, it is not under there. Is it under here? No, it is not under there. [14:02] You never quite understand where the money is going to be. It always is about the vision as Dan pointed out earlier. And you never see the actual payoff. I mean they have been limping along for four years since they were the dot in dot-com. I mean, Jonathan Schwartz I think is a brilliant leader and has articulated well before pretty much any CEO in the enterprise space, the coming firestorm of consumer technologies driving the enterprise, yet they don t seem to be able to capitalize on it. James? Governor: [14:51] Yeah, again, I mean I think the significant problem there is just they honestly got, they actually did get a little bit too fat on those revenues from the first dot-com explosion and they ended up with hardware that was just too expensive. And we are sourcing a drop off there. Linux has made a huge impact on their business. I mean, the question about whether Amazon is material in terms of share price and/or revenues. [15:19] Linux has been the big problem because Sun not only shipped the really big servers, on these that s not a lot of network service as well and a lot of that business pretty much disappeared in a very short space of time. It has taken a long, long time for them again to get some of that back. So I think that now they have done some of the important work to make Solaris the kind of environment that perhaps developers will begin to retarget in those kinds of environments. [15:44] But certainly, I think that has been the heart of their problem. I mean at the end of the day, let s get this straight, I mean air war and vision everything else, Sun makes its money from selling boxes and so they have to sell a lot of boxes and yes again, if people are building into the cloud instead, that is exactly why they need to do that as well. Gillmor: [16:03] But they are getting hurt on the box side, I mean this last quarter, IBM and HP basically took away, what was it, 2% of their market share? Governor: [16:13] Well again, I mean IBM just released its E10 Mainframe, which is a really nice box. A lot of customers have been looking forward to that. That pushed up their revenues nicely and then a lot was on the services side. So they do have a more complex portfolio. I don t think it is easy. [16:28] Frankly, this thing has been dragging on a long, long time. I mean the one thing I think in Jonathan s favor, if I m him and I am trying to talk to the street is at least there were growth businesses. [16:39] And we are definitely seeing a significant uptick in some areas. I mean these Niagara boxes they are shipping, these multicore machines, they are selling really nicely. I think the one disappointment to me when I looked at the results, they should have been selling more tape. I mean, they bought Storage Tech and I think that that s - they should have been really selling more of that. I think that was their opportunity to actually grow some right now because storage and archiving and compliance at the moment is just a very hot market. Gillmor: [17:12] All right, so then the other problem is that they are selling into this social media kind of consumer epiphany kind of marketplace, and they talk about Java and JavaFX having such penetration and they are being boxed out by Google with their deal with IBM in terms of services and whatever that relationship is going to be. Dan was at that conference last week and so he probably Governor: [17:44] Yeah, what was that about? You mentioned it the other day. I don t really know about that. I know that IBM and Google said something about doing something about cloud or something. I don t think IBM gets the cloud at all, but we ll see about that. But what s the story, Dan? Farber: [17:59] Well, I think for IBM the cloud is basically mainframes serving lots of virtual machines up that cheat for corporations. They don t have a notion of providing more of a consumer fit. However, with Google, what they re doing is working with Google to embed Google widgets and mashups into corporate applications. But they re not selling Google apps or anything like that at this point, although I m sure that s where Google would like to head with that. Gillmor: [18:27] OK, and then the other place where they re getting boxed out is on the iPhone. Scoble, you and I were talking about this earlier. Are you still there, Robert? Scoble: [18:37] Yep, I am. Gillmor: [18:39] In handicapping which of these rich Internet applications frameworks is going to be on the iPhone first? Scoble, you think that Java will be the last one to be there, right? Scoble: [18:53] Yeah, Java s the least interesting one to put on the iPhone. Flash has some reasons that Steve Jobs would consider it. A lot of games are in Flash, but he s clearly turned that one down. So, I think Steve has said I m not going to let another vendor control my destiny. I m going to build my own developer platform, and I m going to build it in-house. I m not going to let anything external go on my iPhone. Gillmor: [19:23] So, James, do you see any kind of disconnect there with this attitude that they re the S in social media? Governor: [19:34] The S in social media, that s great. I thought we re talking about phones. Scoble: [19:41] Guess what, I use friend feed about 40% of the time. It s on my iPhone. So, if you re just [...] and customer-level social software, my iPhone already has a dramatic adoption curve change there. Google reports that their services are seeing dramatic adoption level curves on the iPhone compared to any other device. [20:05] So, if you re not on the iPhone, you re getting locked out of a whole set of things. The adoption models, people, influencers, developer platforms. Steve Jobs says he wants control. Governor: [20:21] Yeah, and that s right. But there are still other companies out there that have backends that they can t sell to. I mean, Sprint and all of those companies will continue to sell gear, whether it s Scoble: [20:30] Yeah, but people who use Sprint phones don t use the Internet in anywhere close to what the iPhone usage model is. Until we get phones from Nokia, LG and Microsoft that come close because I have a Microsoft phone and it sucks for the web. I can t stand using it. I have a Nokia phone that cost $550 that sucks for using it on the Internet. I never use it. I has a frickin GPS, it has a five megapixel camera, but it sucks for using it on the web. [21:02] My iPhone, the reason I keep it in my life is for the web. It s for the consumer Internet apps like stocks and app and web apps. Until somebody comes out with a phone that is decent to use on the web, it s over. Governor: [21:20] I m not going to disagree with that. I think that the iPhone experience is great. I have an N95 mostly because of the video. I have a young kid, I have a two-year-old, and the quality of the video is why I use it. I do use it to access the Internet a lot, that s my phone. [21:35] But I certainly understand, in Silicon Valley more than anywhere else, the huge concentration of the iPhone and that s a very significant factor. Scoble: [21:47] Not just Silicon Valley, either. I was in Gillmor: [21:51] Robert, let him finish. Governor: [21:54] Let Scoble finish or me? Gillmor: [21:56] You. Governor: [21:57] I certainly wouldn t dream of saying that the iPhone model and the complete vertical integration that Jobs is delivering here is not successful. It s a closed garden and it seems to be one that people like. And obviously that s going to be an incredibly important part of mobile construction going forward, and mobile is exactly where the world is going. Gillmor: [22:22] Alright, so why do you think that Sun is shut out of these kind of approaches? Governor: [22:29] Everybody is shut out of Apple. Everybody is shut out of Apple. Come on. Farber: [22:36] Salesforce isn t. Governor: [22:37] Salesforce isn t? Farber: [22:39] EA isn t. Governor: [22:41] Sorry, BA isn t? Farber: [22:43] EA. Gillmor: [22:44] Electronic Arts. They showed a bunch of apps. We re going to see what the apps are in a couple of days. Governor: [22:51] I mean from an infrastructure standpoint. Of course from the application side that is a slightly different deal, but Sun isn t an application company. Gillmor: [22:58] But they have Neil Young on stage. They re selling the idea that they re hip in the social media space and they re getting locked out of the most viral platform on the planet. At some point, are they a white box company or what? Farber: [23:13] What is the most viral platform on the planet? Gillmor: [23:16] The iPhone is. Farber: [23:20] And Sun is getting locked out of that, you re saying? Gillmor: [23:21] Yeah. A year ago Jonathan was talking about how Governor: [23:30] I don t think they re the only one. OK, the Salesforce example is a good one. Certainly I see a lot of other enterprise software companies that are targeting that. But I see, from an infrastructure perspective anyway, which is my view of the world it is a little bit different there actually is a fair amount of shut-out. [23:54] I m amazingly impressed by Apple that it has been able to create an experience that is so slick and so beautiful that people who ordinarily would choose openness do it. You can t argue with the success of that business model. It s fucking incredible. That s exactly right. [24:15] This is what I m saying, basically. If the only way to make money in future in the world is through Apple and iPhone, then yes, Sun is in the crap. Gillmor: [24:23] No, that s not what I m saying. What I m saying is that they re changing the discussion from being about their crappy last quarter to being about what I consider to be a social media cozying up to the influencers and the space. They have graphics on their keynotes that Hugh McLeod did. They had Neil Young. They are selling a vision which they are being locked out of by considerably powerful viral players in the industry. To me, there s a disconnect there. Governor: [25:05] I would agree with that, but let s understand this. The PS3 thing, I think that s a pretty successful platform. Gillmor: [25:14] Absolutely, and I think Neil Young made that point. Governor: [25:19] Well, there you go. The fact is that I think he called them. Anybody wants some niceness. Any company on the fucking planet that has a chance to have Neil Young come to that conference, if he wants to do it Gillmor: [25:33] It was fantastic. Eric Clapton played at the SAP conference. But the question is Gardner: [25:38] Who gives a shit who plays and where? That s just PR crap, and I don t think it has a lot to do with it. Gillmor: [25:45] I think it has a lot to do, the PR crap of selling into the blogosphere with an inauthentic message. I mean, don t get me started on that. Governor: [25:56] I ve got to admit, from my perspective would I have preferred that I was invited to meet Neil Young in the blogosphere? Of course I would. Let s be honest about this. I would have loved to have an invitation myself. [26:08] So, if you re talking about the gaming and the PR aspect, hey, I m all about that. Go ahead, say it. I m not going to disagree with that. But it was nice to see him there. Gillmor: [26:19] It was fantastic. I m not complaining about not being invited. I m complaining about the fact that this bait-and-switch, and it continues to be. I don t know how long they can survive on the vision of a future that every other company that s going to make money in that space is not them. Governor: [26:42] No. The thing that amazes me is, in a way that, I mean, I remember years ago, it was like, is Logistics going to buy them? Who is going to buy them? Because at the end of the