Robert Scoble

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's on-stage meltdown at the All Things D conference last week was so bad that people – including even Zuckerberg's most vocal ally, Robert Scoble – are calling for him to step aside and hire a new CEO.

These people are nuts.

They are nuts to think Mark should step aside.They are nuts to think Mark would step aside.

Yes, Mark has made mistakes. As a 19-year-old at Harvard, he said some demeaning things about Facebook users, treated business partners unethically, and may have even broken some laws hacking into a Facebook user's private email account. As the twenty-something CEO of a global company, Mark hasn't handled the media's obsession with privacy very well and he is plain awful at interviews and keynotes.

But, like it or not, these mistakes do not matter at all.

Facebook users don't know about them and they probably wouldn't care if they did. For them, Facebook is a useful product. 500 million people use Facebook each month. Half of them come back every day. The company's revenues, which are diversified in a way Google only dreams of, will push $2 billion this year – up from ~$800 million in 2009. Last month, when Mark looked more inept than ever, new user growth actually accelerated. Clearly, Mark's mistakes have not effected Facebook's ability to make good product.

Even if Mark's various foibles and failings did matter, we doubt very much Mark would step aside over them.

The very reason Mark started Facebook instead of doing Harvard Connection with the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra was that Mark wanted to control his own company. This impulse to be in charge led to every big decision Mark has made about Facebook since:

• The reason Mark took his first outside investment from Peter Thiel was that Peter wanted him to have control over the company.
• The reason Mark took VC funding from Accel Partners is that Jim Breyer allowed Mark to control three out of five Facebook board seats.
• The reason Mark refused to sell Facebook to Yahoo for $1 billion was that he wanted control over the company.
• The reason Mark sold 1.6% of Facebook to Microsoft was that it would allow him to control the company.
• The reason Mark took funding from Digital Sky Technologies, was that DST CEO Yuri Milner is OK with holding non-voting shares because he wants Mark to control the company.

Facebook's org-chart is littered with whited-out names of brilliantly successful Internet executives who came to the company believing that they would someday be CEO. Point-in-fact: Facebook's current COO, Sheryl Sandberg, got the job because she was the one deeply experience candidate for the job who never expressed aspirations for the top job.

The fact is, Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg's company. He controls 3 out of 5 board seats and in November 2009, Mark re-jiggered Facebook's shareholder structure into one that mirrors The Washington Post Company's and Google's. After Facebook IPOs, Mark and his allies will control stock that grants them 10 votes each. Everybody else will get one vote per share. Mark isn't really CEO; he's king.

So no, Mark Zuckerberg should not and will not step down. The next CEO of Facebook will probably be his (unborn) kid.

Nevertheless, you won't see us or the rest of the media quit over-analyzing Mark any time soon. Like the vicious tweeting crowd at the All Things D conference, we are in awe of Mark's youth, power, wealth, and his product's popularity with users.

See Also:

• Zuckerberg's Meltdown: Your 10 Essential Takeaways
• Mark Zuckerberg's Meltdown Hoodie – Yours For Just $2,550
• ZUCKERBERG LIVE AT D: The Twitter Story

Obviously, Zuckerberg's performance at the All Things D Conference was a mess. Anything redeeming?

Image: All Things D

No. Mark's performance was plain awful.

Image: All Things D

Was it surprising? Had he performed better previously or we assumed he had been "trained" on these answers?

Image: Asa Mathat | All Things Digital.

Not surprising at all. Mark had a horrible keynote at SXSW a couple years ago and a TERRIBLE interview on 60 Minutes before that. Guy is anti-charming.

Image: Ethan Bloch

Does Facebook need to bring in a more experienced CEO if the company ever goes public? (Like Google's Schmidt or is Sheryl Sandberg CEO material)?

First of all, Facebook may never go public (seriously). Second: No, Mark should hire a handsome CFO to talk to analysts and the press. Steve Jobs doesn't do earnings calls.

Image: Gizmodo

Will we be seeing less of Zuckerberg going forward?

Image: All Things D

Hopefully. Sheryl Sandberg, a Google and DC veteran, is extremely polished. Put her on stage, Mark.

Image: Vogue

Miss Mark's epic meltdown? Catch up here.

Image: All Things D

ZUCKERBERG LIVE AT D: The Twitter Story

Join the conversation about this story »

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post written by Robert Scoble, who travels the world for Rackspace interviewing tech geeks for building43.com. He’s one of the most popular (stalked) users of location-based services and has 8,215 friends on Foursquare. Here he writes about what the location-based world could look like in 2012 and what might keep it from happening.

It’s January 2012 and you’ve just gotten your new Android 3.0-based phone. You’re going on a road trip so you start up the newly-released Foursquare. Gone are the checkins of 2010. Now you tell it where you’re going. This time we’re headed to Harrah’s at Stateline, Nevada. But this is no Foursquare you’ve ever seen before. They’ve finally integrated Waze, Tungle.me, and Yelp information into it. So, let’s discover more of what happens on our trip.

As we pull out of my driveway in Half Moon Bay we cross a geofence that sends alerts to the various systems that I’ve connected to Foursquare. Tungle.me knows I’m meeting Mike Arrington for dinner at Harrah’s. He gets an alert on his mobile phone that I’m on my way and Glympse sends him the ability to watch my progress so he’ll know if I’ll be on time. Plancast lets me know that four friends are attending the Black Eyed Peas concert at Harrah’s tonight. I see that Siri is offering to find me tickets, so I ask it to find me some tickets under $400 each.

Later in our drive, the kids are screaming. Hungry critters, they are. So, we pull out our cell phone and tell Siri: “we need fast food along the freeway.” Siri has already been tracking us as we drive along and it now contacts the APIs from Foursquare and Yelp and then compares both of their databases and quickly learns that we mostly check into McDonalds and In-N-Out. The system talks to us: “we found a McDonalds five miles ahead right off the freeway and there’s an In-N-Out eight miles ahead.” It continues: “If you want to try something else other than your two usual choices, or if you need a recommendation for the kids, let us know.”

McDonalds sounds fun, because Milan likes their Chicken McNuggets and also likes playing in their Playland play rooms. So, we ask Siri: “does that McDonalds have a Playland?” Siri runs off to McDonalds database of Playland locations and comes back with: “no, but we’ve found a location with a Playland 25 miles ahead of your location. Would you like to choose that one?”

After McDonalds we hit Sacramento and now Foursquare, which has joined with Israeli-company Waze, pops up with a new warning: “there’s an accident ahead and travelers in front of you are reporting delays of 15 minutes.” Up pops a photo of the wreck that an anonymous user has posted. Soon we find ourselves stuck in that traffic and so we start chatting with people also stuck in the traffic. “Hey, have you tried the Beatles station on Pandora?” someone asks. Damn, is that Steve Gillmor stuck along with us?

As we drive down the road we’re constantly checking into various things and places. We ask Siri about National Historical places along our route and it pulls up Wikipedia entries about what we’re passing onto our screens.

When we arrive at Harrah’s, we cross another geofence which lets Arrington know we’re here. It also checks us into Foursquare, and tells us: “there are 29 other people we know about, including three of your friends.” Then Siri (which received a message from our geofence) chimes in with: “are you still having dinner with Mike Arrington at 8 p.m. at Friday’s Station Steak & Seafood Grill?” I answer: “yes.” That goes away, but on screen is a Yelp review about that restaurant and I
realize that the attire is dressy and I only have jeans and t-shirts. So, I ask Siri: “are there any other four-star restaurants like Friday’s Station nearby?” It answers with a list from Yelp and then it starts showing places that still have spots left for us this evening by querying OpenTable’s APIs. Siri then tells me it has found two seats for tonight’s show at Harrah’s outdoor arena, and asks if it should buy them from Stubhub?

Since there’s a couple of hours before dinner, I figure I’d find a cigar shop since I have a feeling Arrington might like a good cigar since the 12th Techcrunch Disrupt conference was a huge success. Siri again finds me a place named “Puffin,” which is a short walk away from the hotel.

While at dinner, Arrington says he’d love to take the Heavenly Valley Gondola up to see the view. We make arrangements to meet the next morning to do just that and off I go with Maryam to see the concert. Oh, and Siri automatically checked us into the Pepsi Loot app, because we were in one of the official restaurants that uses Pepsi and that gives us free stuff for checking in at Pepsi-serving locations.

The next morning, when I walk out the hotel to meet Arrington at the Gondola ride I walk through another geofence that Tungle.me has setup around my hotel (it manages my schedule and knows where I am) and it sends an alert to Siri saying: “I see you’ve left the Harrah’s hotel, can you let me know where you are going?” I say into my phone: “I’m going to meet Mike Arrington at the Heavenly Valley Gondola.” It quickly brings back a link for the Gondola ride and asks: “is this where you are headed?” I say: “yes.” It says: “if you buy your ticket at your hotel you’ll save $6 per ticket; see the concierge.”

After I get home, Siri talks to yet more webservices: Blippy, to get my credit card statements, and Expensify, for expense reports. Siri fills out my expense report with details gained from me along the way. It knows which dinners were business ones, and which ones were personal based on things I’ve set along the way (in Google Calendar, for instance, I mark my personal meetings with a tag).

I can hear you saying “Scoble, what are you smoking?”

Seriously, you can do a whole lot of what I’m talking about (including saving the $6 on the gondola ride) today BUT there is something wrong: these services are all information silos that aren’t aware of each other.

I tried to do most of this scenario this weekend. What happened?

• I found out about the concert at Harrah’s too late to buy tickets.
• I found out about the $6 discount on the Heavenly Gondola after I had gotten to the top.
• I found out about the traffic jams after I had already gotten caught in them and didn’t know much about what caused them. And the system couldn’t tell us the best spot to have dinner based on traffic conditions (maybe if we had waited an hour and a half we would have spent less time in traffic).
• I almost got a ticket because I didn’t know about a speed trap up ahead of us. If more people used Waze or Trapster that wouldn’t be a problem, but Waze doesn’t know about Trapster’s users and Trapster doesn’t know about Waze’s users.
• We ate at a McDonalds that didn’t have a Playland. Siri doesn’t know about Playland, or that McDonalds has a page where you can look for locations that have Playlands. Our dinner date didn’t know we were running late because of the traffic jam (yeah, we called, but in the future they’ll just know exactly where we are and how long they should expect to wait for us).
• Siri, when it worked, didn’t bring us anything serendipitous because it didn’t know what people on Google Buzz were talking about. It didn’t know anything about how many friends were checked in at the hotel, or at places near us. It didn’t know that a popular concert would start in a few hours and that it might have been able to get us seats.
• As we drove along using Waze it didn’t tell me about historical landmarks. It didn’t show me where the In-N-Outs were. And when we wanted some coffee we had to switch to Google Maps to find Starbucks.
• When in Google Maps I turned on the Google Buzz layer and it showed me lots of Buzzes from people but it didn’t try to point out important ones that might impact my experience. It forced me to click on dozens of Buzz items on a map in an attempt to find anything useful. Ever pick up rocks in a stream wondering what you will find underneath? That’s sort of like Buzz’s experience.
• When I checkin with the new Pepsi Loot, it doesn’t check me into Foursquare, Loopt, or any of the other loyalty services that are coming out over the next few months.
• If we flew into Reno instead of driven, TripIt wouldn’t know anything about my Google Calendar and couldn’t warn people on my calendar if our flight was late. And TripIt isn’t able to check us into the airport even though it knows our plane landed.
• Yahoo news didn’t know that we left Half Moon Bay, so didn’t know that it should bring us news about Stateline, Nevada.
• Gilt didn’t warn my wife when we passed by the outlet stores in Vacaville that there were some great deals on purses she was considering.
• Paypal or Square weren’t able to be used for anything on our trip.

So, who are the winners and losers here?

Overall, the losers, so far, are us. In 2010 we’re seeing more and more location data silos being produced. The most recent ones are Loopt Star and PepsiLoot. These new services add more of a “tax” and don’t really combine in ways to make our lives interesting. That can’t continue if companies actually want us to use location-based services.

The losers, also, are the whole industry. Everyone will see slower adoption of all location-based services because of their limited utility if this doesn’t change.

But more specifically, the winners and losers:

Winners?

• Apple, because it already owns Siri, which is the best UI for smartphones for interacting with the world around you. And hooking up all these different services will be pretty easy for them to do over the next 18 months.
• Google, because it already has so much location and scheduling data and is gathering more every day.
• Facebook, because it already has so much data about people that it can use to present location information to us and can sell access to that data to others, like Apple, who will use it to augment their experiences.
• SimpleGeo, because they are becoming an arbitrage system for moving data in real time between all of these players. That should be monetizable in the way that Twitter is selling data streams to Google and Microsoft.

Losers?

• Yahoo, because they haven’t yet figured out how to get us to share much location data with it.
• Microsoft, because it is locked out of most of this new world too.
• Gowalla, Brightkite, Whrrl, because they haven’t made any moves yet to present malleable social graphs in the way that Foursquare has.
• Individual loyalty programs. The first ones, like Pepsi Loot, will probably be popular because they are first but others will find tired and unengaged consumers and will need to join up with bigger players to get traction.

Along for the ride?

• Plancast, TripIt, Blippy, Tungle.me, Expensify, are all along for the ride. They provide unique data that the others don’t and unless someone else comes along that provides that data in a better way than these folks do, I think they are safe for the moment.

Disrupted?

• Yelp and other restaurant listings could be disrupted in this new world where you’ll choose your restaurants based on where you actually are, what friends you’ve added to systems like Facebook, and tips from your friends (which are quite different from the crowd reviews at Yelp).
• Yahoo News could be dramatically disrupted. Today, I met with the Yahoo news team and talked about needing different news based on where I was (I found out about riots in Guangzhou, China, after we arrived there and Twitter friends asked us if we were caught in the riots?)

Commerce winners?

• Gilt, Foursquare, and Loopt seem to be aimed in the right direction by bringing users goodies for using these services. But it’s too early to say that one of these will be a clear winner in bringing promotions and offers to us. Bigger companies, like Google, with its huge sales teams, or, better yet, eBay, which has relationships with lots of small-town retailers, could totally change the game here.

So what could keep the world I laid out here from happening?

I’ve already caught wind of plans that Apple has to build Siri into a much more complete offering. You’ll be able to talk to your iPhone that will come out next year (Siri is owned by Apple but won’t be built into iPhones in a serious way until 2011) and you’ll be able to do a variety of tasks from ordering a pizza, finding a taxi or a movie time, to recommending a restaurant to take your date to. But what happens if Apple ends up building its own maps, its own location checkin service, it’s own advertising system for bringing promotions and offers to you, its own payment system, and its own travel apps? Well, then, this system would happen for Apple customers but that would weaken the ability for other companies to compete. And that would force Google’s hand into competing, or buying, these companies up, which would keep Apple from having access to some of these companies’ APIs.

But Google buying these companies and integrating them together with its voice recognition systems is probably the best possible scenario. Facebook isn’t a mature enough company yet to properly integrate all of these into some sort of new business graph and make that all usable by 2012.

Some companies are trying to integrate these services, or provide infrastructure that makes integration possible as well.

CloudMade is using the OpenStreetMap to hook these services together on a common map. And the IETF is working on a variety of standards to make it easier for companies to interoperate with their location. If they can succeed, the vision I laid out of 2012 should be a reality.

[photo: flickr/pinto 2003]

Facebook will be rolling out its promised “simplified” privacy controls to its users starting Wednesday, Facebook vice president Chris Cox announced Tuesday.

Cox made the announcement from the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in NYC.

The venue is hardly surprising and in keeping with Facebook’s recent reliance on sympathetic media outlets to combat the backlash against its overweening ambitions and abysmal privacy practices. TechCrunch’s founder and head Michael Arrington recently came to the company’s defense, chastising the media for being too hard on Mark Zuckerberg.

On Monday, the Washington Post gave the company free space on its Op-Ed page to write a nearly content-free post on how it was listening to users. In fact, the company is promising little to its users and seems set to continue its new practice of turning over user data to third parties without getting prior permission.

Coincidentally, Washington Post publisher Donald Graham is on Facebook’s board and is a mentor to Zuckerberg. As Ryan Tate at Valleywag puts it: “An opinion piece in one of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers carries more moral authority than a blog post on Facebook.com,” and that Graham has been a sort of “press consigliere for the startup founder.”

The closest the company has come to apologizing came the day before in a Sunday e-mail from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to the corporate-blogger-for-hire Robert Scoble. In it, Zuckerberg admitted to “making many mistakes.” Scoble is notorious for trying to gain as many followers as he can on any social network — and his main complaint about Facebook is that he thinks it should have no privacy at all.

In fact, after getting the e-mail, Scoble put a hand-wringing post entitled When Do You Throw a CEO’s Privacy Under the Bus,” worrying that publishing the e-mail from his “friend” would ruin his future relationship with Zuckerberg.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, NPR ran two different segments on Facebook’s woes (On the Media and All Things Considered) — both of which this reporter participated in — and the company declined to participate. Perhaps that’s because when Facebook officials get put on the spot — as the company’s public policy head Tim Sparapani was on a radio show last week, the company’s arrogance shines through.

For instance, Sparapani called the company’s new initiatives an “extraordinary gift to the public,” a statement that tech blogger Danny Sullivan called an “extraordinary rewriting of history.”

Wired.com asked Facebook to comment on its choice of outlets by e-mail, but the company did not respond.

Facebook, it seems, knows the value of sharing only with close friends, even if it keeps pushing you abandon that setting in your own profile.

Photo: Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg Credit: Andrew Feinberg

See Also:

• Facebook to Launch “Simplistic” Privacy Choices Soon
• Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative …
• Facebook Loosens Privacy Controls, Sparks a Backlash
• Openbook Creator Offers Privacy Design Solution for Facebook …
• Zuckerberg: New Privacy Controls, But No Apologies

In a surprising turn of events Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has responded personally to the recent privacy complaints.

Facebook has been through an intense week of criticism and debate over its privacy issues and recent move to make everyones Facebok info public unless they choose to flick them back again – something which is unfortunately not every easy to do.

In an email to tech celeb Robert Scoble, Zuckerberg says that the company will be announcing changes this week and wants to make sure that they “get this stuff right this time”.

There are two ways to see this form of personal response. One, as one commenter put it, Zuckerberg is using Scoble as a tool to essentially put himself and Facebook in a better light with early adopters and tech fanatics (most of Scoble’s readers and followers are). The other is to see this as a genuine attempt to accept there have been problems and  reach out to calm fears by personally contacting someone who Zuckerberg knows many (of the right) people trust.

Full email posted below, more discussion from us to come.

Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg addresses Facebook users’ privacy concerns in a column in the Washington Post on Monday.

Zuckerberg admits that users find their privacy settings confusing, and promises new, simplified settings “in the coming weeks”. The public statement follows a private email exchange with a blogger in which he admitted “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes“.

The majority of Monday’s column (the thrust of which is quoted below) doesn’t really provide us with new information. It’s the standard patter about Facebook’s mission, and the company’s belief that sharing makes the world a better place. But Zuckerberg does outline a plan to revise the site’s privacy settings:

Facebook has been growing quickly. It has become a community of more than 400 million people in just a few years. It’s a challenge to keep that many people satisfied over time, so we move quickly to serve that community with new ways to connect with the social Web and each other. Sometimes we move too fast — and after listening to recent concerns, we’re responding.

…The biggest message we have heard recently is that people want easier control over their information. Simply put, many of you thought our controls were too complex. Our intention was to give you lots of granular controls; but that may not have been what many of you wanted. We just missed the mark.

We have heard the feedback. There needs to be a simpler way to control your information. In the coming weeks, we will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use. We will also give you an easy way to turn off all third-party services. We are working hard to make these changes available as soon as possible. We hope you’ll be pleased with the result of our work and, as always, we’ll be eager to get your feedback.

I find Zuckerberg’s private response far more impressive than this public one. His private email to Robert Scoble, reprinted with Zuckerberg’s permission, included honest phrasing like “we’ve made a bunch of mistakes” and ” I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time”. Those concessions to critics verge upon being a mea culpa, even if they stop short of a direct apology. The Washington Post piece is much less direct: No doubt vetted by multiple members of the Facebook team, it almost seems to blame the users for being unable to work their privacy controls.

Nonetheless, Facebook is smart to address critics in such a public fashion. Whatever the resolution of this privacy debacle, I’ve no doubt the controversy will eventually be forgotten, just like every other Facebook flap over the years. Simply put, Facebook is on an unstoppable roll right now: It’s the dominant force on the social web, with Google and Twitter trailing far behind.

Tags: facebook, privacy, Zuckerberg

In his first comment since the privacy controversy of recent weeks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that the company “made a bunch of mistakes” and wants to “get this stuff right this time”.

Zuckerberg has been criticized from some corners for a lack of communication on Facebook users’ privacy concerns, and a public comment from the CEO hasn’t been forthcoming. Today’s concession isn’t a public apology as such: Rather, Zuckerberg replied to a private email from tech enthusiast Robert Scoble, who then requested permission to reprint his response on his blog.

Zuckerberg’s reply has some merit to it: Facebook wants to respond to the dustup with a product fix. Rather than simply telling users what he intends to change, he’d rather go ahead and make that change.

Except that this isn’t a model that typically fairs well in the PR and media worlds: To Facebook’s audience, it has seemed that Facebook either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about user concerns around privacy. If Facebook does indeed share user concerns and will soon make changes (as Mark explains), a very early mea culpa and increased communication with the press may have saved Facebook from a great deal of criticism.

We’ll have to wait and see whether Facebook’s updates calm tensions around the company’s privacy stance. Here’s Zuckerberg’s reply in full:

“Hey,

We’ve been listening to all the feedback and have been trying to distill it down to the key things we need to improve. I’d like to show an improved product rather than just talk about things we might do.

We’re going to be ready to start talking about some of the new things we’ve built this week. I want to make sure we get this stuff right this time.

I know we’ve made a bunch of mistakes, but my hope at the end of this is that the service ends up in a better place and that people understand that our intentions are in the right place and we respond to the feedback from the people we serve.

I hope we’ll get a chance to catch up in person sometime this week. Let me know if you have any thoughts for me before then.

Mark

Shared by Jesse Stay
Singer's been rather critical lately. I'm not sure I see the benefit of this post, but he's a reputable source. Singer's a great DJ.

The early adopters tend to overvalue what’s new.  That’s fine and nothing out of the norm, it’s just what they do.  But what bothers me is when they proclaim a new piece of technology created by companies they’re fans of changes not just general consumer tech, but also industry x or y without really understanding those industries.

Case and point: Robert Scoble thinks the iPad is changing art and music.  Not the consumption, the synthesis.

His proof for this?  3 singular example videos of artists using an iPad to create their works:

1. A sketch artist
2. A hobbyist using an iPad to DJ and play around with soft synths
3. A famous pianist using an iPad on stage for a few moments

And each example is an interesting experiment, but falls short of the real thing.  A convergence device does many things, yes.  But it doesn’t do one thing well, especially in areas there are many players working hard to evolve devices for specific use over years of iteration to answer unique problems.

Let me provide an analogy.  Consider the duck:  it can fly, swim and walk on land.  In a sense they’re a true convergence animal.  Except…they’re not really that good at any of those things compared with animals who specialize.  Compared to the elegance and grace of an eagle, a duck’s flight is clumsy.  Compared with the agility of a fish, a duck’s swimming ability is poor.  Compared with a horse, a duck’s ability to walk/run on land falls short.  Comparing the iPad to devices designed to address specific solutions within verticals is like comparing a duck to any animal that specializes.

Anyway, back to Scoble’s examples – they are experiments and interesting as that, but to say that the iPad is changing synthesis of art – especially electronic art – shows a misunderstanding of it.  As an electronic musician for nearly 10 years I’d like to offer my perspective of examples 2 and 3 Scoble gives – the music examples.  The sketch artist example I’m not going to touch since I’m not actually a sketch artist but perhaps some of you can comment on that.

Let’s go through Scoble’s points:

Now that more and more people are getting iPads we are seeing just how they change everything, especially art and music.

I fail to see why a new consumer-designed device you can’t customize – which is powered by a closed platform and a crippled web browser – changes music creation or performance.  It’s a bit like saying Guitar Hero changes rock music.

Remember, Scoble isn’t talking about consumption, he’s talking about production.  Think about that for a minute.  Serious producers of digital art have studios they work in. While the right apps on the iPad might allow for the sketching of ideas on the go, this is easily possible already on a laptop (and is much more sophisticated there).  Also, the fact that a laptop can run full fledged audio production suites like Ableton Live means I can essentially have my studio on the go as opposed to stripped down applications.  Further, multi-tasking, something vital to audio production, is not even possible on an iPad.

Let’s look at Scoble’s first example – iPad DJ Rana June Sobhany

A few weeks ago I met Rana Sobhany who had gotten tons of compliments at the first iPad Dev Camp with her iPad DJ’ing system. So, she gave me a look at what she’s doing. That video went viral and has been watched half a million times. Wild.

OK Scoble, you know exactly why it went viral – someone playing around with iPads to do something interesting right during the product hype cycle.  It’s a neat experiment with what she is doing, but the fact that “that video went viral and has been watched half a million times” doesn’t really mean anything from a trend perspective.  There is no logic behind how you’ve framed this:  that just because a bunch of people watch a video with a music-lover using a gadget in a unique way is “changing everything, especially music.”

Anyway – here are some factual limitations to this setup:

• Touch screens or a mouse are not precise – that’s why midi controllers were created to work with soft synths.
• You can’t scratch with the same accuracy as vinyl (or at all from what I saw).
• Rana notes this would be a great solution for a newbie as it’s “the cheapest option when compared with CDJs”  I disagree – you can see it’s a custom setup she has (that would confuse a newbie) and there are far cheaper and simpler solutions than this that are even inclusive of a mixer (for example, you could be an iPod DJ or get an all in one kit from PSSL/123DJ).
• The audio quality coming out of the iPad is going to be sub-par when compared with hardware designed purely for music.

Even the artist herself doesn’t think her setup is changing music, as illustrated by her Tweet:

Awesome that Rana says this, and unfortunate Robert frames his argument the way he does and uses her as an example.  But lately it seems like he’d rather be sensationalistic than actually have depth to trends he reports on.  Let’s consider some actual examples of those who changed digital music:

• Pioneer of electronic music Robert Moog best known as the inventor of the Moog synthesizer (the first commercially-available modern synthesizer) changed the music industry and helped give birth to countless new genres of music.  Evolution of the synth continuous to this day.
• Technics set the industry standard for vinyl turntables with the 1200 which – 30 years later – is still the best device for mixing and scratching out there.  Even DJs using digital tools like Serato/Final Scratch or CDJs will admit this.  The 1200 is the device that changed the industry, virtual DJ software merely mimics it.
• Software like Ableton Live changed how modern producers create and perform and allows incredible flexibility, customization and editing on the fly that it enables musicians to create sets that previously required far more sophisticated setups.

If you’re versed in music history, it’s obvious the iPad doesn’t fit within the evolutionary path of digital music synthesis.  In all cases, change happened from those passionate about music and interested in solving specific problems.  This is not at all what the iPad is.  Also, if Scoble did his research into the wide array of DJ gear that already exists and the fact that there are many, many, many unique styles of mixing and setups (both custom and available for purchase), he’d realize this singular example is interesting but not changing the industry direction.

Scoble goes on to say:

But she’s not the only one using iPads. I met Wil.i.iam who is the music genius behind the Black Eyed Peas. We talk mostly about Twitter, but at the end he pulls out his iPad too.

The “music genius” bit aside (not even going to touch that’s what he thinks of the Blacked Eyed Peas) Scoble tries to add into his argument that this person “pulling out an iPad” during an interview means the iPad is changing art.  Except his pulling out of the iPad during the interview had absolutely nothing to do with music production.  Here Scoble is trying to add another proof point hoping no one actually watched the video.  Skip to the last 10 seconds of the video and you’ll see what I mean. It’s unbelievable he added this into the argument and makes me trust the rest of his content a lot less.

Next, Scoble gives an example of Lang Lang, famous pianist, walking out on stage and playing flight of the bumblebee on his iPad.  While it’s interesting, I highly doubt Lang Lang thinks that true pianists are going to give away their real pianos during concerts for iPads.  It’s a fun use of a new device, but the beauty of analog instruments is never replaced by digital.  I’m passionate about electronic music and I’ll freely admit there is something special about the range, warmth and beauty of real instruments that cannot be replaced by digital.  Lang Lang is having a bit of fun, but this is not a game-changer for the classic music world.

Conclusion

Scoble tries to paint a picture of a trend that iPads are changing art composition with this piece and three examples, but I’d be hesitant to say any real artists are going to start abandoning better gear to scale down for a convergence device.  Other than as a publicity stunt, as an artist I don’t see this making sense on any level.  I left a comment on Scoble’s blog noting this – which he immediately responded with “I disagree” – thus the motivation for this post and fleshing out my thoughts further.

What do you think?

The iPad Is Not Changing Music Production And Performance is a post from The Future Buzz

Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro, a Pogo stylus and loads of creativity – that’s all David Newman uses to draw such impressive portraits of people with his iPad.

David, who previously worked as a newspaper court artist, has covered popular tech events including Twitter’s Chirp conference, PayPal DevCamp, Startup Weekend and Google’s IO with his iPad. You can see his entire collection of iPad paintings on flickr.com.

Robert Scoble spotted David while he was busy sketching portraits of people at the Google IO event and created a quick video that will give you some idea about David’s painting workflow on the iPad.

Related: Make an iPad Stylus at Home

Artist Uses iPad as a Drawing Tablet at Tech Events

Originally published at Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal.

Google-watchers, add this name next to Sergey and Larry: Vic Gundotra is one of several Googlers with the meaningless title Vice President of Engineering. What the guy really does is evangelize Google’s technology and worldview to the people whom the company hopes will build their businesses with it, or on top of it. His job is to drive adoption of, and build momentum for, Google’s specific vision for future technologies and businesses built atop Google’s APIs, operating systems, and other tech platforms.

Gundotra spent the Nineties and most of the Oughts at Microsoft. Let’s spell it out: This guy got software developers to put down their seething hatred for anything Bill Gates touched, and actually try Windows Live. He hired Robert Scoble to put a bloggerly face on Microsoft’s marketing to software developers.

Google wanted Vic so badly that they waited for him to take a year off after leaving Microsoft in 2006, in order to keep from violating his non-compete agreement.

Today, Gundotra seems to get more face time than CEO Eric Schmidt or search-engine manager Marissa Mayer. A few weeks ago, he hosted Conan O’Brien’s appearance at Google. This week’s Google I/O developer conference is pretty much The Vic Gundotra Show.

His public prominence has gotten to the point where a source called to suggest that he’s being groomed to take over the company. I don’t think so. But he’s certainly the guy to put in front of the geeks. Gundotra is good enough onstage that he survived Conan’s harsh put-downs. O’Brien told the audience that Vic was “the most condescending man I’ve ever met.” Vic had the sense to smile.

Last year, Gundotra struck a chord with attendees at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference, even when making dubious statements like: Google can’t afford to support multiple smartphones. Gundotra preaches a gospel of HTML5 browser apps, rather than using Flash or spinning off a new app for every popular mobile operating system. Regardless of Google’s cash reserves, it’s a technically appealing goal.

If you weren’t at Google I/O, this video clip (sorry, I can’t figure out how to embed it) shows how easy to follow he is. You get the sene he practices at home. Attendees said Gundotra has lost last year’s awkwardness and developed a fluid, opinionated onstage manner. He can sling corporate-speak like “momentum” and “adoption,” yet you get the feeling that in a pinch, he could optimize your assembler code. His personality emerges between the canned lines: After showing attendees a performance test at which Android thoroughly beat the iPhone, he tossed off a cocky aside, “I wonder if that will be in the App Store.”

He’s no Conan O’Brien, but he’s becoming one of the company’s most powerful assets. Right now, Google is sliding into the position once held by Gundotra’s previous employer, Microsoft. The company has gotten so big, so successful, that their every move is scrutinized for violations of the old “Don’t Be Evil” code of conduct. Vic Gundotra comes across as a guy steeped enough in technology to know good from evil when he sees it. More important, he’ll convince you he’s right.

Tags: Google I/O

Companies: Google

People: Vic Gundotra

I’ve said my peace on the Facebook Privacy Fiasco of May 2010 (tune in next month for the Facebook Privacy Fiasco of June 2010 featuring many of the same characters and all of the vitriol of previous fiasco editions).

If you’re not aware of the specifics of this months outrage, it comes down to this – the media and a bunch of very loud, angry and poorly dressed users are shouting “burn her, she’s a witch!” I’m playing the part of the guy in the armor with the impeccable logic trying to calm down the mob:

All this privacy distraction has caused Facebook to pull way back on their shakedown of the social gaming publishers, the other Facebook story going on right now. One thing is certain, in the very short term Facebook has been weakened.

The game publishers will use it to extract better terms from Facebook. But there is a far bigger opportunity for a hungry competitor to get a lot of attention and possibly turn things around for themselves.

MySpace, the once great social network that still has scores of millions of active users, should be reworking their policies and products at a feverish pace to provide the perception of giving users fair and easy to use privacy controls along with a promise never to change those controls without their express permission. YOUR DATA IS SAFE WITH US is how the messaging would read. They’d announce that along with some extremely well known privacy advocate joining the company’s exec team, and pair it with a promise to have an outside firm review their privacy policies and execution regularly.

A lot of these and other ideas were thrown out there by Robert Scoble earlier today. Facebook isn’t going to do any of them. But heck, MySpace has absolutely nothing to lose. Why not make a firm decision to be the “safe, secure” online social network. It might just get them in the game again.

That’s what I’d do if I were one of the co-presidents of MySpace (we’d be tri-presidents then, a virtual gaggle of presidents). It’s all laid out for you clean and nice. Make the announcements at a huge press event, hire the people and the outside auditor, and then work like crazy to make MySpace a reasonably presentable site to hang out on. Something that doesn’t scream “trailer park.”

I mean, if these guys come out of nowhere and are conducting a very successful grass roots anti-Facebook campaign, why not MySpace?

I can’t deal with a mob trying to take Zuckerberg down for some ridiculous out of context instant messages six years ago. But I’m all for good, clean, slightly devious competition. The floodgates are open, MySpace. Prove you have something left to fight with.

I want to make sure I post this clearly. As of today, I’m now an affiliate for Rackspace Cloud (affiliate link). In the past, I’ve disclosed that they host my site gratis. I also rave about them at every chance I can get.

So, I applied and was accepted as an affiliate marketer for Rackspace Cloud, so if you need a top quality hosting company for your web projects, you know who has my vote.

It’s not for everyone. It’s not inexpensive. You’re paying for top grade service and/or a lot of extra bells and whistles. If you’re a low traffic site, or a non-critical site, then you don’t necessarily need the big guns at Rackspace Cloud just yet.

My reasons for loving this service are as follows: great uptime, ease of use, unbelievable customer service, Robert Scoble, and Texas.

Why I Love Affiliate Marketing as An Option

I’ll write about this more shortly, because I have a lot to say about it. But one thing I love about affiliate marketing is evident in this post: I find a service or product that I like, I evaluate it, and then, if it’s something I feel that others can benefit from using, I have the option of sharing it with my community.

The seller gets something from this transaction: my warm endorsement to you. YOU get something from this transaction: my belief that the product or service lives up to a level of quality I think will be useful to you (if you have a need for bulletproof uptime and excellent service).

In the coming days, I’ll talk a bit more about affiliate marketing and why I think it’s going to help a lot of people in this economy. But for now, I just wanted to tell you that I’m officially a Rackspace Cloud affiliate.

Tweets about this, Tweets about that; there are Tweets flying all over Twitter about all kinds of things, but no easy way to display one or more of them gracefully on a website or blog. Until tomorrow, that is.

In a post today on the company's blog for media companies interested in using the service, Twitter highlighted ReadWriteWeb's use of screenshots in highlighting the smartest Tweets about last week's HP/Palm deal. "But the truth, of course, is that a pasted-in image of a tweet is a bit of a hack," the company wrote. "We have an alternative to propose; it's coming tomorrow." We emailed the company and they told us what it is!

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Robin Sloan, who works on Media Partnerships at Twitter, explained thusly:

The alternative is super-simple: just a little script that generates a block of HTML that looks just like an embedded tweet, but is just normal HTML text (instead of a flat image). Should be a handy tool -- (I know I plan to use it a lot on Twitter Media).

That sounds like a small but exciting feature!

Uber-curator Robert Scoble has been talking about the need for some easier way to curate social media signals. Of this new feature, he told us by phone from Israel: "It's nice. It's a good little step along the path that we need to get to real time curation. I'd like to be able to bundle Tweets and tag them." Scoble recently wrote about what he calls the 7 big-picture needs of real-time curators, and embedding Tweets wasn't one of those. "A curator is an information chemist," he wrote in that post. "He or she mixes atoms together in a way to build an info-molecule. Then adds value to that molecule."

This is a little reminiscent of European blogger Robin Good's argument a few years ago that a concept called Newsmastering was going to become the chic occupation at any firm with business touched by the online river of news. For some reason that hasn't happened yet. It seems that online curation, editorial selection of items flowing through dynamic collections of online sources, has proven too removed from direct, immediate and crude value to have caught on with more than a handful of companies, most of which were already in the publishing business.

Twitter has high hopes for its favorite feature and may very well be adding more curation-type tones to that in the future, as well.

Either way, starting tomorrow, you'll apparently be able to click a link and get some code you can paste onto a blog to display a Tweet. That's cool.

I find that the only people saying privacy is dead seem to be those named in its will. Social media researcher danah boyd highlighted some of these conflicts of interest when she admonished, “No matter how many times a privileged straight white male technology executive pronounces the death of privacy, Privacy Is Not Dead.”

Privacy is not simply about confidentiality. Privacy is about control – you having control over the nature, disclosure, dissemination, and usage of your information. Privacy is about ensuring data exchanges happen under certain norms and in appropriate contexts.

Many Silicon Valley executives, however, seem to think users should embrace sharing most of their data with the entire web. This attitude is typified in a comment by blogger Robert Scoble: “We are all going to have to learn new ways to deal with privacy. Personally I think privacy is dead. Get over it. If you want it to be private don’t put it on a computer and don’t put it on the Internet. My entire life is public. If you want, you can search for naked photos of me (there are three out there).”

But can we really extrapolate the experiences of certain social media personalities and apply them to web users in general? Would we be as comfortable with a thirteen-year-old girl commenting that you could find three naked photos of her online?

In fact, the incongruence between Scoble’s public living and the worlds that even other US bloggers navigate became apparent in a post by Michelle Greer on geolocation. Greer does not oppose geolocation services, but she does note how they can increase risks for a person dealing with stalkers. And such risks are not eliminated by the person simply avoiding these tools – if trusted friends start using them without careful thought, an attacker can exploit data beyond their target’s control.

Robert Scoble may be able to have his entire life public, and in an ideal world, perhaps everyone else could too. The difficult reality, however, is that people in a broad range of circumstances require a greater degree of privacy to thrive socially – and at times, even to survive.

Of course, Scoble is far from alone in his outlook. I often see reactions to various stories that include sentiments I can describe at best as oversimplifications or misunderstandings. In some cases, these ideas seem to carry an appalling amount of arrogance as well. I’ll give four examples with short rebuttals:

• “No one cares about what you ate for breakfast.” What if you died of poisoning one morning? Suddenly your family, the police, and many other people would care very much about your breakfast. But while I could offer dozens of other similar scenarios, they can distract from a more important point: Who are you to decide whether anyone cares about my breakfast? Why should I or others rely on your judgment in determining the value of the information that I choose to share? We all know people who care about details as mundane as our meal choices simply because of their relationship with us, even if that knowledge seemingly provides them no tangible benefit (unlike the poison investigation).
• “What use would basic profile data be to a malicious third party? Disclosing it would not really matter.” This perspective includes an informal logical fallacy familiar to many in the scientific community: an argument from incredulity. In other words, since the questioner cannot imagine a certain scenario happening, it must be impossible. As before, I could easily frame a few situations where simple information disclosure could cause serious consequences for a given user (and the Google Buzz roll-out provided real-life examples) but doing so would fail to address the real issue: Only a profile’s owner has the knowledge and background required to outline all possible implications of disclosing their particular bits of information to various other parties.
• “If you don’t want everyone to see certain content, you shouldn’t post it online to begin with.” Nearly everyone who routinely interacts with websites sends them content that carries expectations of confidentiality. Would you be comfortable with sites publicly sharing your credit card information? After all, you’re not liable for unauthorized charges, a point Blippy noted after a few of its customers’ credit card numbers leaked out on Google. The flexible nature of the Internet has always allowed people to share content in a way that limits the audience. Nothing technological has to prevent users from enjoying degrees of disclosure between encrypted e-mail transfer and publicly indexed web pages.
• “Participating in social media is a choice. If you don’t like Facebook/Twitter/etc., don’t use it.” This advice assumes that personal choice is the only determining factor for using a social media service. Under the same assumption, I could argue that driving a car, using a mobile phone, having indoor plumbing, and buying groceries instead of farming are also choices no one is forced to make. Many Facebook users could leave the service in the sense that doing so would not affect their physical survival, but many of them cannot leave Facebook without significant negative effects on social, relational, and perhaps even economic aspects of their lives. Once again, few of us are in any position to evaluate such situations for other individuals.

In essence, no social media executive can assume that he or she understands the ramifications of reducing user control over information. No algorithm can make the same social judgments a human being can. And yet, what sort of trends do we see in the market? As an example, Facebook has gradually widened the definition of “publicly available information” while also adding features that aggregate and publicize data unexpectedly.

As Bruce Schneier notes in an excellent video presentation, however, you and I are not Facebook and Google’s customers. We are their products. They sell information about us, and hence they have a business interest in us sharing more information with more people. Yet for us, this approach tends to increase the amount of noise we deal with. I would submit that the market for online social networking needs to shift towards a model where business interests somehow align with users’ best interests. Obviously such a proposal is easy to state but difficult to implement and monetize, but it’s time we started rethinking how we approach these services.

For instance, many social networking sites have been structured more around technological paradigms than social ones. Most sites include a private messaging feature generally intended for confidential, one-on-one communication, then a method for sharing information that’s generally public, but perhaps includes features for limiting the audience. Perhaps we should design a more fluid communications system that reflects the sort of individual and group interactions we make offline or shoehorn into existing online services.

Another practical step towards ensuring user privacy would be to implement restrictive default settings. Which would be worse for the user: posting content privately that was intended to be public, or posting content publicly that was intended to be private? Rather than require a user to complete long lists of privacy settings prior to engaging with a service, keep content locked down by default and make it simple for a user to then open up their content more broadly.

Privacy is not dead, but many of today’s web applications seem intent on killing it. We desperately need alternatives that empower users with intuitive, defensive privacy controls. Note that by calling for better privacy models, I’m not saying we should avoid public sharing. If users want to live as Robert Scoble, a social media service need not stand in their way. (While Facebook once had more restrictive privacy defaults, it also used to prevent most content from ever leaving the site.) But rather than assume most people are Scobles, we need to find value in also enabling less-public sharing and protect the information that users themselves value.

I do agree with Scoble on one point: “We are all going to have to learn new ways to deal with privacy.” I also see a grand opportunity for entrepeneurs to help shape those “new ways” while keeping privacy very much alive.

At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the web, a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com, Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp. You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in.

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These changes have raised concerns among privacy advocates and are even now being questioned by government officials like U.S. Senator Charles Schumer who is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into how social networks handle our private information.

And yet...and yet...after spending the weekend on these "instantly personalized" sites, I have to admit...begrudgingly, mind you...that the experience itself is amazing.

Online Music Gets Personal, Too Personal?

Pandora's Internet radio is a service I usually partake of via its mobile application on my iPhone, not its regular website. But after the launch of the newly personalized Pandora, I had to take a look.

And it was worth it.

I immediately discovered which of my friends had the same musical interests as I do. My editor, Richard MacManus, for example, is also a fan of The Killers! Who knew? And apparently, a whole bunch of friends are getting into MGMT now.

But finding connections like these aren't the only types of discoveries you can make here. As social media user extraordinaire Robert Scoble found out, you can easily discover your friends' more embarrassing personal tastes too. Kenny G?, Scoble laughingly chides a co-worker after stumbling upon his decidedly unhipster musical interests.

These are precisely the types of things we want to stay hidden. Kenny G, for instance. But also our secret obsession with that attractive actor or actress, our fondness for pictures of cute kitties, our forays into celebrity gossip sites when we have a reputation for being intelligent thinkers, our secret Star Wars addiction and so forth and so on.

While there aren't "instantly personalized" sites showing you all these types of interests just yet, believe me, there will be. If Facebook has its way (and guess what? It will), your real identity, not just the public parts you've willingly shared in the past, will be revealed to anyone and everyone unless you take action to opt-out.

The Real You Can No Longer Be Hidden

This is precisely as it should be, Facebook CEO Zuckberberg, more or less said. Earlier this year, he made statements regarding Facebook's new openness, claiming that if he built the social network now, he would make a lot of the data housed there more public by default. This would reflect the current social norms, he said.

But that's not exactly true. Facebook isn't reflecting social norms, it's attempting to create them.

That said, what an amazing creation it is. On Yelp, I can find the reviews my Facebook friends authored with just a click. I can see who else really digs that local sushi place. And I can do all this without going through the whole "re-friending" process that Web 2.0 sites have put me through in the past again and again.

I'm there, my friends are there, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen. Frankly, it feels right. (Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Mike Melanson agrees.)

A Minute on the Lips...

But it's oh so wrong, isn't it? By giving into to Facebook's vision for the web, we're ceding control of our data, our likes, our interests, our "social graph" (aka who we know, who we friend) - everything - to one company. Historically, one very, very closed company. We're definitely worried about the implications of that. You should be too.

But in the meantime, like that calorie-rich dessert we know we shouldn't eat, we're sampling Facebook's web and secretly savoring its deliciousness. Why does everything that's so wrong have to feel so good?

Blast you, Facebook. Blast you.

If you've been following our posts about augmented reality (AR) in the last few months, you've noticed that we speak often about practicality and its importance for the proliferation of the technology. Sure, gimmicky applications can be fun and new, but it's my opinion that the more practical and useful an AR application is, the better suited it is to help push AR toward mainstream acceptance. With that being said, AR developers should be aware of a contest being hosted by metaio, the makers of the junaio iPhone app and mobile AR platform, which will reward creativity and practicality in AR.

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The company says over 200 developers have flocked to the platform since opening up junaio's API to the public, and to reward them, they are giving $5,000 to the developer who makes the best use of it. Developers can sign up on junaio's website where they can follow instructions on how to get started creating a "channel" for their AR content. The company is encouraging as much creativity and practicality as possible in order to stand out against the crowd of simple POI locators.

"The creative potential of junaio is vast: AR Mashups, multiplayer games or scavenger hunts, interactive, indoor and outdoor exhibitions, tours with animated 3D characters, eduainment right on the spot and location independent gaming," the company expressed in press release. "It is up to the developer to challenge his imagination and become as much creative as he wants to."

On June 16, the top five channels with the most subscribers will become finalists in the contest, and the winner will ultimately be chosen by a panel of AR and IT aficionados, including Robert Scoble, Thomas Carpenter of Games Alfresco, and Dr. Christian Geiger, professor and mixed reality researcher at Düsseldorf University. I will also be participating on the judges panel, and am very excited to see the innovative AR channels that could come from this contest.

I am also thrilled that metaio and junaio are pushing the creative side of the contest. It is much easier for gimmicky AR applications to become popular, but these kinds of applications don't benefit AR as much as actual useful implementations. The subscriber threshold will merely be used to shorten the list of applications that will be considered for the prize, but that doesn't mean the most popular one will win.

For more information on the contest and on the junaio platform, check out their website, or if you happen to be in Germany, stop by at AR DevCamp in Berlin this Friday. There will be free sessions available for developers to learn the capabilities of the API and will provide a jumping-off point for those new to the platform.

Social media is expanding the power of word of mouth marketing. But as always, WOM is hard to measure. Forrester is attempting to rectify that with their latest measure, Peer Influence Analysis.

In keeping with traditional WOMM thought, Forrester says that Mass Influencers, who make up just 16 percent of all online Americans, are responsible for 80 percent of the brand impressions in online social settings.

But the big winner is Facebook:

Of all the social influence impressions, Forrester found that 256B were on social networks, and another 1.64B were on other forms of social media (including blogs).

Forrester divides the Mass Influencers into two groups: Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens (3.7% of the online population falls into both categories). Mass Connectors have a lot of online friends—537 total across all networks, Forrester reports. Mass Mavens are people with a high level of expertise in their field. While Mass Mavens are driven to collect and share facts and opinions, Mass Connectors are driven to know others. Naturally, both frequently post about products and services.

As always, Influencers are the Holy Grail of WOMM. Unfortunately, Forrester doesn’t offer a whole lot of advice on finding those influencers. However, once you find them, Forrester says, don’t just use the same campaigns you’d use with the rest of your social media efforts, or with your “social broadcasters”:

Social Broadcasters are the “famous” individuals in your market, like Robert Scoble or Michael Arrington for consumer electronics. While they can achieve a great number of impressions, they cannot equal the power of unleashing thousands and millions of Mass Influencers. You need separate programs for Social Broadcasters and Mass Influencers.

What do you think? How do you find influencers? Are they still as influential as this study indicates?

For the past two years Robert Scoble and I have been attending and shooting the Pacific Coast Dream Machines Show together in Half Moon Bay. It’s one of the best car shows in the United States, but is not just limited to cars. There are fire engines, trucks, airplanes (and airplane rides), steam engines, just about every kind of mechanical machine you can imagine.

Anyways, we are going to hang out and shoot the event again this next Sunday, April 25th, 2010. The show starts at 10am. Both Scoble and I will have to leave in the afternoon a little early (he’s going to Israel and I’ve got my son’s baseball game) but I’m looking forward to shooting the morning and part of the early afternoon down there with anyone else who can make it.

If you like shooting cars this is one of the best places to shoot cars I’ve ever been. Everybody is totally cool with open photography and are happy to have you photograph their vehicles. They also do a monster truck show (photo above) which is great to shoot as well.

I set up an upcoming page for the photowalk here. Come on out if you can make it!

More details on the event can be found at the event’s official website here. The event is $20 per adult, $10 for seniors, $10 for 11-17 and free for kids 10 and under and includes parking. The event is a fundraiser for the Adult Coastside Day Center.

You can check out my Flickr photos of the event from the past two years here.

Ever visit a website (like this one!) and get bombarded with share buttons from Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz and more? Ever see login options for Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect, Yahoo, Twitter and more?

A new proposed standard from IM and toolbar company Meebo hopes to solve this “Nascar problem” (ie. logos everywhere) by detecting which networks you’re already logged into and only offering those as options.

Meebo is announcing the proposed standard tonight, calling it XAuth (Extended Authentication) report the NYTimes and VentureBeat. It’s not really a single login, but instead it’s a way to offer only the login options that are relevant to you. Meebo is putting XAuth into its Meebo bar, which appears on a number of publisher websites. Robert Scoble of Building43 interviewed Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg about the plans — you can see the video below.

Who’s on board? Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, MySpace and Disqus, to name a few.

But there’s a big problem: Twitter and Facebook don’t appear to be supporting XAuth yet. That means, rather than uniting these sharing services, the runner-up services are all banding together. That doesn’t simplify things for users or publishers.

And Facebook is unlikely to play along: the company would much rather dominate the sharing space. On Wednesday at the F8 conference, Facebook will launch a product that aims to spread its “Like” button across the entire web. Facebook will also launch a website toolbar, reports The Times, hoping to kill off Meebo’s share bar.

While we love open standards and user choice, the smart money is on Facebook here: to the average user, one choice (Facebook) is much simpler than a handful of lesser-known services.