Iran: The Sea of Green Spreads WorldWide. We Stand With You!

If I had any doubts about the importance of effectiveness of Social Media, those have been erased forever in my mind, over the last week.

The news of the events coming from Iran are not coming to the television. They aren’t coming to the radio. They aren’t coming to the newspapers. All of those tradtitional outlets are getting their news from the same sources I am.

The Revolution will NOT be Televised.

But it will be Tweeted

It will displayed on FriendFeed, and Facebook, with full motion video on Youtube.

When this struggle started, I didn’t grasp the importance of it completely. I did understand the reality of how oppressive regimes deal with their people, and how they punish them for taking part in such uprisings. And I had some understanding of the importance of the change in the delivery of the news coming from Iran.

But i didn’t realize how truly powerful, life changing, that is.

The people of Iran are reporting the news. Recording pictures, audio, video, on their cell phones, digital cameras, whatever they have handy. They’re bringing it to us on twitter, Friendfeed, Youtube, and Facebook. And it was this that drew me in. One video, one that I didn’t expect to see. A post on FriendFeed, called to me. It looked like a video of encouragement, something to inspire Iranians, and people across the world to support the protestors in their fight.

And, yes, it was that. But what I didn’t expect was the background video that was used to make it. By now, you’ve likely heard about this video, or seen it yourself. Yes, the video of Neda dying on the street, having been shot fatally in the chest. Eyes rolling back making her look like she was looking at the camera. But I knew better as I watched this, I knew those were the eyes of someone struggling to hang on, and who wasn’t going to be able to do so. And then there were the cries and screans of anguish from the people gathered around her.

And at that moment I was forever changed.

No longer was this protest in Iran something that “was going on over there”. No, this was going on right here, where I live. Right on my FriendFeed. And as I sat her choking back tears, I knew then that something inside me had changed, and that I could no longer just sit and hear about the events that were unfolding. I had to participate. And then, before I knew it, that video was everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, Youtube, and even on TV.

And at THAT moment, The World was changed.

The world will never be the same after watching that video. That video was the turning point from simple protests against an unfair, fraudulent election, into a full scale revolution. And not just a revolution in Iran that might just overthrow their current government. No, in fact this is a revolution that is already spreading across the planet. Within days we’ve seen the beginnings of the absolute demand for freedom of information and speech flowing all the way to China.

Is this the first guerrilla cyberwar?

If you watch Twitter, you can see that in Iran they’re using it to communicate with each other. They’re using Twitter to communicate protest sites, engagement tactics, first aid info, and to conduct the cyberwar.

The cyber war is amazing. We expect the typical disinformation to be passed with regard to intelligence reports, news stories, and so on, and we also expect that a repressive regime will use any available means to track down their opposition. But this is the first time that ordinary citizens are directly involved in cyberwarfare on such a grand scale.

While FriendFeed and Facebook are relatively free from battle, the war on Twitter is intense. I’ve been watching streams of the various #hashtags associated with the elction and protests. The sheer number of bots posting to the hashtags is staggering. Both sides in this struggle are using bots, and partially they’re using them to “take over the channels” Most of the tweets posted are posted from brand new accounts, with nearly no followers. There are all kinds of tweets trying to instill fear and incite violence among the protestors. There are tweets that are trying to trick protestors, and, likely, supporters from other countries into compromising their IP addresses, locations, and computers themselves. Some is simple information/opinion warfare (propaganda)- trying to ensure that public opinion across the globe swings one way or the other. Some of what I see is not propaganda. It’s straigh up computer warfare.

The cyberwar includes hacking, distributed denial of service, and anonymous proxies. And along with each we see actions from both sides. We see that Iranian goverment agents are trying to setup proxies so that they can continue to track and identify protestors. We see government agents also trying to get people to committ denial of service attacks in order to slow the bandwidth out of Iran to a trickle. I have seen protestors identify specific sites that they need taken out of service; sites that I saw included identifications of individual protestors, who would then be hunted by Iranian police.

What do we really know for sure if there’s such a dark undercurrent to all of this?

What I know for sure, is that the Iranian government is harming its people. I know for sure that people have been beaten, wounded, shot, and killed. I know for sure that people are scared, and have little recourse against their oppressors. They do what they can. They march, they sit in the streets, and when they’re attacked, they throw stones. And then they’re shot at again. And they run. But while they do all this, the people of Iran take pictures, the film and record. While people can be coerced, and people may lie, the camera does not. The camera reports what it sees. And the Iranian people are well armed in this.

What I also know for sure, is that the people of Iran, armed with their cell phones, cameras, video recorders, and social networking accounts may be beaten, but they will not be beat. I know that as a people they have a history of not giving up. I know for sure that they will overcome this oppression, and take back their land, their vote, and their freedom.

And the final things I know for sure:

I know for sure that the lessons we learn today in Iran will be applied over and over, thoguhtout the world. I know for sure that the oppressed people of the world will hear of this uprising, and take heart that they too can overcome.

But I also know, that it won’t come easy. It won’t come cheap. Not in Iran, and not anywhere else. In Iran they are paying with their lives today, right now in their own streets. In other parts of the world they do not have the advantages that the Iranians do: internet, computers, cellphones, and the skills to use all these things. The internet is a tool of freedom. It’s designed so that no one can “take it down”. We must spread the means to use these tools to all the oppressed peoples of the world. In some places that will take a great deal of change. Zimbabwe would have been a much different place with these tools to prove what what going on at the hands of Robert Mugabe. Palestine would be a much different place if they weren’t prevented from having electricity and communications. It would be obvious who bombed who, and what. There would be no more lying to the rest of the world.

The lesson is clear. We must now take it to heart.

But for that to happen, the People of Iran must Succeed! Please show your support, do not let their struggle be forgotten, or swept under the days news. Use the social media in front of you right now, and make sure that the people around you hear the message loud and clear

All people deserve Freedom. All people deserve Respect. All people deserve Love.

These are rights that we all have. Rights must be defended. And we must all stand for each other.

I’ve put some links in the comments where you can find news and other sources. Please check them out. Thanks!

Google's Wave

The big players finally made some major moves this week, and a big week it was. Google announced their new product (and protocol) “Wave” and Microsoft announced their new search engine “Bing“.

Bing is promising an improvement on the “normal” search process. Helping you to categorize and sort through the results of your searches in a more useful way. This will change the game the  SEO experts have learned to keep their sites on the top of the result lists that Google puts out. Not unlike Wolfram|Alpha, which fancies itself a “computational knowledge engine” Bing is calling itself a “decision-engine.”  But is this search engine really offering anything new? From the preliminary looks of it, no, not really. But, in truth, half of the new search reality is really nothing new. It’s a matter of honing in on personal tastes, habits, and behaviors and showing what we each really want to see when we’re looking for something. The identifications of single actual persons is new. And Microsoft hasn’t shown us how it will achieve that yet.

Still, showing me the different types of items found when I look for my search terms is half the battle. Microsoft is promising me groupings that differentiate research from products, from people offering those products, deals on them, and so on. This is a huge step. And it doesn’t actually require that Microsoft (Bing) know me as an individual, though that would help immensely.

It’s also a huge step in Microsoft getting to know the people who use their search engine. We’ve always tracked users behaviors, but there’s always been a sort of haphazardness to how people behave while the scour the net looking for not just the information they want, but the “type” of information they want. Sorting this out ahead of time means that you’re going to be more readily able to go directly to the type of information that you want, waste less time, get less frustrated, and come more quickly to viewing what you wanted to in the first place. This makes your tracked process of: search, find, clickthrough, and conversion much easier to understand, measure, and sell to advertisers. After some time of this the databases will fill up with more of the kinds of information that individuals really like and want to see. With that information, companies like Microsoft ware going to be able to put more ads, and search results right in front of you. the more a company like Microsoft can learn about you, the more it’s going to put the pressure on companies like Facebook, who already know a lot about you, but aren’t doing anything much with that data. So, we’re likely to see a big announcement soon from Facebook, IMO.

But, just like the rest of the tech-blogs, I say “Enough about Bing, let’s get to the real news!”

The huge news this week was the Google Wave. with this new standard for communications that Google is not only promoting, but soon to release a product for, Google takes a huge step forward in several different ways.

First, they’re really putting the screws to Microsoft in the software development arena. Microsoft is really losing this battle, in my opinion. Microsoft has failed to see the coming of several trends that will unseat it as the software powerhouse that it once was.  And this is happening while even diehard Mac users are installing Windows7 on their Macs through VMWare.

Second, this is Google’s first real play in the realtime, social arena that is actually going to make use of their core competncy. Search. Where Google has failed in the past with social media attempts (Dodgeball, Jaiku, Orkut), the Wave is going to succeed.

The Wave is on one level the next logical upgrade to their complete software offering. It encompasses email, documents, photos, “lifestream status updates” wikis, and more.

And the big thing that no one I’ve seen has talked about? Waves will be searchable!

This is the beginnings of Google’s foray into realtime search. If they can get you to build your conversations in such a way that you can search them then they can come out very clearly on top of the realtime search game.

But, you say, “I don’t use Google software.” That’s ok. Google sees this, and is offering their Wave product as a “reference implementation” of the wave protocol. And the protocol itself is built on all the best communications protocols, and the extensibility of an API. In other words, you won’t have to use Google’s software, or their servers to participate in a wave conversation.

Google wants to see “federations” of servers (service providers) support the wave protocol, and join in to the conversation. This is in Google’s best interest. they want to create a network of easily searchable conversation data. They want you to join in the public and semi public conversations carried out on a wave so that they, too, can learn more about you, who you are, and what you do. This will give them a very unique perspective for personal, behavioral targeting for advertisers. Truly, you’ll create wave conversations that will include the input from these very advertisers. And once you do, you’ll be giving the advertisers and Google more data on how people and you think and work.

Rob Diana suggests this isn’t a Twitter killer. And on the one hand he’s right. Why, Twitter is directly supported as input and output in a Wave conversation already. On the other hand, Twitter doesn’t seem much on the idea of “federations” – they’re already missing out on the potential to interconnect (and lead) the federation of OpenMicroBlogging sites (like ident.ca, TWiTArmy, and so on) Rob also suggests that the companies that need to worry about the Wave, are indeed the companies that develop Twitter clients, like Seesmic Desktop, Tweetdeck, and PeopleBrowsr (which I happen to work for). I think he’s right. These companies need to worry, or embrace the idea, and figure out how they can participate, and add value to the Wave, and the conversations that happen in waves. I’m not sure if all these companies can do that. The federations that Google promotes are likely the salvation of these companies. However, The more Twitter dependentthey are, the more likely they won’t survive this type of change in the marketplace.

Who should really worrry about both of these products? Facebook. These two products, Bing, and Wave strike deep into the two best kept potential fortunes at Facebook. Personal tastes & behaviors, and realtime (or near realtime) conversation. Facebook needs to step up its game and fast. Thankfully for Facebook, both of these products are not yet available to the public, giving them some breathing room, and, also thankfully, Facebook just raised another couple hundred million dollars.

What’s the real outcome of all this? A very good question indeed. What remains to be seen is how the three big social media player are going to react to this news. Microsoft has a ton of cash to start buying up properties to make their play even more significant. Twitter, in my opinion, needs desperately to find itself a buyer. I’ve made my position on this pretty clear. Facebook needs to start getting its users out from their walled gardens, an learning to be more public, and at the same time needs to start really putting out some search driven products.

And what of the smallest of the big three, FriendFeed? FriendFeed has a very interesting position, and one I think might just turn out to be the best position of the big three social media powerhouses. First off, they already support the XMPP protocol that is in large part the basis of the Wave (while Twitter has dropped support). Secondly, their whole aggregation and re-publication platform is geared toward search. We saw this week on FriendFeed how effective that was when we noticed out conversations being indexed by Google while we were having them! (um,in realtime, in other words!). The nature of their aggregation is properly setup for search (the permalinks to aggregated content are geared toward SEO). And, the nature of the content that people share on FriendFeed gives us tons of personal taste and behavior information And isn’t this what I said we need? And finally, and certainly not least of all, FriendFeeders have no history of the presumption of privacy that Facebook users do. There’s nothing for them to relearn. They’re already on FriendFeed to share. And (oh, yeah) one more thing: FriendFeed was designed, and is run by former Google superstars. Mark my words, FriendFeed is going to be a huge concern going into this new era of communication. And Paul Buchheit said it himself “Real-time conversation is what’s next.”

So, I have to ask – What do you all think of the Bing? The Wave? The future of your conversation, decisions, and communications? How do you feel about it all being tacked, targeted and searched?

Why I switched from Tweetdeck to PeopleBrowsr

A lot of you have been asking and quietly wondering why I’ve switched from Tweetdeck to PeopleBrowsr. Rather than trying to explain this over and over, I’m going to give you a comparison right here. The fact of the matter is that there’s too much in PeopleBrowsr to actually put into a single tweet!

Many of you know that I’m something of a power tweeter. I send a lot of tweets out, and I spend a lot of time paying attention to a lot more. When I’m tweeting a lot I tend to want to talk to many many different people. Social networking is all about engaging with the people you meet online, and if you’re following as many people as I am it’s a huge challenge to see what they’re doing.

As soon as I learned of it, I was all about Tweetdeck. It gives me the ability to create groups, and create searches very easily. At the time I started using Tweetdeck I was following about 500 people. Some people were overwhelming me with their volume of tweets, and others were lost in the that sea of data. So I made some groups. And I was searching for a new job, so I made a couple different searches. At this point, I was watching my DMs, my Replies(mentions), All my Friends (people I was following) a group of power tweeters, a group of job tweeters, a search on some terms I was looking for in a job, and random job related tweets in another search. And then i realized I needed to create a couple more groups beyond that. This finally left me with only one column in the Tweetdeck maximum of 10. I was out of space.

Tweetdeck just wasn’t enough!

On top of that, I was out of machine. Tweetdeck was quickly consuming all of the resources that my poor little laptop has. I was slowed to a crawl. So I took Robert Scoble’s advice and got myself over to FriendFeed, because Robert said he was able to watch a huge amount of tweets coming into there as well, and make more groups there. But I quickly realized that this was insuficient as well. At that time, FriendFeed’s default mode wasn’t to operate in realtime, and at most 10% of the people I was following on Twitter were also on FriendFeed. And I was continuing to follow more and more people on Twitter.

Still not Enough, Open more Web Pages!

So I went back to Tweetdeck, and I cut down some columns, and created some more groups. I had to stop watching my DMs in Tweetdeck, and open yet another webpage, twitter.com (which I really don’t like) to see my DMs. This exposed me to something I really don’t like: Failwhales!. On top of all this I was beginning to become more active on more social networks, more Facebook time, reading more on Digg, and in general trying to get more new into my stream so that I could start my blog, and find some work. I was making use of TweetLater.com so that I could delay some of my job wanted announcements, and send out other tweets while I wasn’t necessarily focused in my Tweetdeck. I was having to use either search.twitter.com or tweetgrid.com to keep more searches running than I had columns for in Tweetdeck. Honestly, I was overwhelmed. I simply couldn’t keep up. And between the performance problems I was having with Tweetdeck, and Twitter itself giving me failwhales, I was frustrated most of the time. Tweets weren’t going out, I was failing to respond to DMs in a timely fashion, and I was feeling like I was simply working too hard to keep up with all of my social networking. But I knew I needed to continue, because, above all, I needed to find some work! And the job websites just don’t cut it anymore, so I knew I had to step up my game somehow.

I tried a bunch of other Twitter clients, and tried to use FriendFeed as a twitter client. But the best I was able to do seemed to be just what Scoble said: Use Tweetdeck and FriendFeed together.

Then on FriendFeed I ran across a tweet that was my salvation.

I read Ricci’s review of PeopleBrowsr, and knew I had to check it out. Ricci (thankfully) let me know that this was going to be overwhelming at first. So much power doesn’t come without some kind of a learning curve. I was pretty convinced this was the tool for me. After all, Tim O’Reilly probably knows something about what he’s talking about, right?

I fired up PeopleBrowsr and Tweetdeck together and started comparing things. The first thing I noticed was that there was just way more going on in my PeopleBrowsr. Visually overwhelming I thought, but I persevered. I opened up all my stacks(columns) about me, my DMs, Replies, the Following(All Friends), and thought, wow, I can watch all my Followers too! I don’t have to follow everyone back just to see what they tweet about! So then I made a few groups. My groups in Tweetdeck were huge, and it was too much work to add the people right away, so I didn’t give up on my Tweetdeck. I ran them together for a while.

And then I remembered: API calls! OMG, I was going to run out of API calls running both. But I noticed that I wasn’t. Tweetdeck was using its usual, just under 100 per hour, and PeopleBrowsr was keeping right up and delivering the same tweets! This must be some kind of magic. (It is, PeopleBrowsr is caching all the data they get from Twitter, so they don’t use nearly as many of your 100 API calls/hour as most clients). The next thing I noticed was that my machine wasn’t slowing down anymore than having just Tweetdeck open. So with the few groups made, I could watch some of my friends now, and I closed Tweetdeck. Over the next couple weeks I still used my Tweetdeck, but mostly because I couldn’t remember everybody in all my groups, and couldn’t give up on my followers, and my flow. (Now PeopleBrowsr’s AIR client can import your Tweetdeck groups!) About this time I was realizing that I could do searches like I can in Tweetdeck. I asked the developers of PeopleBrowsr (who are VERY helpful, much more so than the Tweetdeck devs IMO) if they could tell me the search operators. I got from them a list of operators that just put Tweetdeck to shame, and tried out the search. Now, I was getting to the point that I had 10 columns(stacks), and figured that I was going to be done. But, no! I just kept making search stack after search stack.

More than just Twitter and Facebook

WOW! I had long ago closed the Facebook column in my Tweetdeck to save on a column, and closed my DMs, and was having Tweetdeck open profiles via the twitter.com website. Not so in PeopleBrowsr. It was all right there. And the PeopleProfiles aren’t just the Twitter profiles, they contain the person’s entire known social graph – shows me their Twitter profile, their Facebook information, FriendFeed, identi.ca, Youtube, Flickr, and more. Incredible.

I wanted more, but I just knew that this application was going to kill my computer. So I tried anyhow I like to know my limits, so I try to break things as quickly as possible. I clicked on the Accounts link, and started filling in the rest of my accounts: Flickr, Youtube, digg, identi.ca, Myspace, LinkedIn, (Plaxo? I guessed I would sign up for that later!). As soon as I had the credentials entered I set about trying to break PeopleBrowsr (and bring my computer to it’s knees). I opened up just about every thing I could. I looked and the only thing that I had un out of on my computer was desktop real estate! Everything was running great. PeopleBrowsr was only using about 30MB more RAM than Tweetdeck. With TWENTY more columns open!

Then I noticed the Outbox, and a little clock icon my my tweet post box up top. With not much to go on for documentation, I just clicked on everything. My brain and I had some idea that this was a scheduler. No way! It IS! This meant, to me, that I could get rid of Tweetlater.com now too. I was getting more and more of my computer back. And still watching more and more data come in! Now I was really jazzed.

I dropped in on the PeopleBrowsr AlphaTesters Google group. I was starting to notice a few bugs here and there. But I was becoming more and more reliant on PeopleBrowsr, so I thought I could maybe help squish a few. I’ve been part of these groups in the past, so I didn’t expect much. I was very pleasantly surprised that someone from PeopleBrowsr was quickly tending to every single bug message that they saw. That’s what I call Service!

The Features List Goes On and On!

So back to PeopleBrowsr I went, knowing that if something was broken, it would get fixed. I started clicking on more things I saw in the interface. I tried the search again. I realized that “Bio” meant that I could search through someones bio! How many times have you power tweeters wanted to do that?! I clicked on the Groups icon to see what more I could do there. I found that I could bring up “#hashtag groups” – everyone that’s posted a tweet with a given hashtag all in one group! I saw the public groups, and saw I could make any group I created into a public group, or share my friends with my friends!

I clicked on the little camera icon to see what it would do. “Upload a file it said” So, since I do what the computer tells me, I did it. And it put the link to TwitPic right there in the tweet post box for me! All I had to do was write up a little tweet. Now I could send my photos out on Twitter, which always seemed like too much trouble to me.

I clicked on the “To” button. I was elated! I had checkboxes for Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, identi.ca and even ping.fm. I tried it, and sure enough I was able to post status updates absolutely everywhere! what I couldn’t send right from PeopleBrowsr, I could have ping.fm send for me. Cool.

I clicked on the litle helicopter, thinking, hmm. Those things are hard to fly What a great feature there. I quickly saw that I could watch the top tweet from each one of my stacks all in a single column. I didn’t have to keep scrolling back and forth, OR have 3 25″ monitors to watch all my data coming in. It’s all right there, right where I need it.

Does this ever end?

Nope. I went back to a tweet, and looked at all the actions I could perform from a single tweet. Reply, DM, retweet. All those seemed pretty expected. But I started clicking on the other icons (which all had mouseover names BTW). First I saw the little speech bubbles. I was pretty sure I knew what those were: the answser to “in reply to” Awesome, but to my surprise, unlike the one previous tweet I see on the twitter website or in Tweetdeck, I saw the entire thread! This just keeps getting better and better!  I saw that I could make a todo list of tweets that had action items in them, email a tweet to someone, link a Plaxo contact, make them person a VIP, make a note, tag the person so other PeopleBrowsr users would know more about them, rate the post or Assign the post to someone (Yes, PeopleBrowsr supports multiple accounts!!!)

Down at the botton of each stack I saw more stuff to click. I could re-sort the stack alphabetically or chronologically, shrink people’s heads (smaller avatars), search through the stack, see just their avatars, export the stack of tweets, just see posts with links. I could even see a map of the world showing me who tweeted from where!

More Improvments

Now, there’s three different modes (Lite, Advanced, and Business). I can recommend this to my not so geeky friends I thought! The lite mode doesn’t show you all the features right away, simplifying the experience for someone who just wants to start out with a simple Twitter client. But soon enough, that’s not enough and you’ll want to look into the Advanced mode. Then my curiosity got the better of me, and I decided to try out the business mode.

Multiple Accounts and Multiple Users

I looked at the few more features that were available. I knew that I could assign tweets, and now I realized that I could enter in multiple twitter accounts! I could easily click on avatars at the tops of the stacks to see what one account, the other, or both would see as far as tweet streams. I realized that in doing so I would change which account sent the replies.

I saw another new icon, a couple of crossed tools. I love tools, so I clicked this. “Campaign Builder” it said to me. And it hit me like a ton of bricks! I could close down not only another web page, but a whole twitter client. Not only was PeopleBrowsr replacing TweetDeck, but it’s going to replace my CoTweet as well! I can have it auto-draft a tweet based on keywords I’m searcing for (it it’s going to ask me before I send it!) I can collect statistics on the keywords I’m searching for, AND I can search for positve and negative sentiments thanks to the sentiment dictionary at PeopleBrowsr.

Customizable Interface

And so finally I could go back to fun things, like changing the colors. I can color code the stacks so that important ones catch my eye. I can change how many stacks are on each screenful, change the font size, change the colors of the tweet backgrounds, change just about colors on just about everything. I could change so much, and customize parts of the interface to my liking a lot. Absolute or relative timestamps, take the Reply icon out of my DM stack (saviing me from embarassing publicly sent DMs!) turn off the autorefresh if I want, change the font size, and so much more. I found I could even have PeopleBrowsr send my DMs to me in an email! (and I can reply to them straight from my emailbox too!)

I haven’t really even touched on the reports (custom searched), the fact that I can view a web page right in the PeopleBrowsr client, the fact that I can bring my RSS feeds into a stack, compress the whole interface into a single stack view, and even share my searches with other PeopleBrowsr users! I’ll save all that for another day. And I’ll show you how to use it all too.

There’s a lot to learn here in PeopleBrowsr, but as I said at the beginning, the power available is more than worth the learning curve. Give it a spin. You’ll soon see why in the latest poll PeopleBrowsr was already voted higher than Tweetdeck. And as I write this post, PeopleBrowsr hasn’t even gone into the Beta stage yet, it’s still Alpha. In my opinion, it’s more stable, and has a smaller footprint than just about any client, and it has easily 10 times the featureset. And, now you can run it in almost any browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and soon IE8) or if you want you can run it through Adobe AIR (and import your Tweetdeck groups for a quick start!)

Now you see why I love this product. And you see why I said it was going to take more than a few tweets to tell you all about it!

Why are you still on deck? Start browsing. And meet some People!

Disclosure: I liked Peoplebrowsr so much, that I joined the company. This piece was written last week, and scheduled for publication today. I also started working for PeopleBrowsr today. If you have any questions about, or problems with PeopleBrowsr, please don’t hesitate to contact me, or @PeopleBrowsr on Twitter.

It’s been a hot week in search this week. Google held Searchology, OneRiot announced its realtime search. Scoopler made a big splash, WolframAlpha had their “soft-launch”, Robert Scoble hosted a panel discussion at the Software Development Forum, with several of the key players in attendance, and LouisGray.com reported on both Tweetmeme’s realtime launch and Mircrosoft’s position that there are holes in the search experience.

Speaking of Microsoft, we should examine this all in light of one old piece of news, and one new one. In old news, Microsoft tried to purchase Yahoo! outright last year, and continues to try to develop some kind of partnership with them.  It was significant that Yahoo! turned down the offers in the first place, feeling that even though their stock was in a slump that the company was worth more than what Microsoft was offering. Not only was that significant, but also the fact that Microsoft wanted to hang onto some kind of deal with Yahoo! and the two companies are still in talks over at least some kind of search/ad deal, even after some hostile negotiations between the two companies. In new news, this week Microsoft announced that it would issue three series of bonds, to raise a total of nearly US$4billion. While the company say that it has no specific plans for the additional capital (Microsoft has reserves of around US$25billion in cash), there is grand speculation in the market about what acquisition plans they might have.

So, I’m going to add my speculations to the mix. While others are thinking that Microsoft has plans to make another bid for Yahoo! or perhaps a play for SAP, I’m thinking this is really a preparation to go after the real money on the internet. The real money is in search. Or more correctly in advertising that’s based on search. There are several key acquisition targets related to this; Twitter, Facebook, Myspace to name a few.  In the case of Facebook and Myspace,  there is a great potential to offer advertisers targeting based on indiviual preferences and behavior. Never before have we known so much about any one individual, by name.

It’s certainly unlikely that Microsoft can develop its own social network, or advertising engine, or search that can compete with any of the frontrunners. But they’ve shown time and again that they are excellent at acquiring their way to the top of markets (while also sometimes blowing it along the way). There’s a distinct possibility that Microsoft could make an end-run around Google, and possibly even come out ahead.  Call me crazy, but Google is no longer the nimble little company it used to be, and is having a harder and harder time keeping up with real innovations in the market, and I think that overall, if it comes down to a simple game of who can buy and integrate with the best startups, Microsoft could win the battle.

Of course there are other players, and some of these players may have a hot enough product to become the “next big thing” in search. Is there a “google-killer” in the ranks of these search engines? That’s hard to say. I only think that one product has the capability of becoming as widely used as Google, and that’s going to take a while. The Wolfram|Alpha search engine certainly has the potential, but it looks like for a while that most people are going to have a hard time getting used to what kinds of questions to ask it and how to ask it those questions. Hopefully in that time the Wolfram team will add more data sources to the engine so that it can calcuate more answers. Certainly for the moment, if the question isn’t something that can be measured, quantifies, or calculated, Wolfram can’t answer it.

And what of OneRiot? The overview of their technology is impressive. My basic understanding is that they’re tracking Twitter for links, and then crawling the links that they find there.  while this is not going to be a “google-killer” I think that this easily makes OneRiot a target for later acquisition by one of the big search engines. With the right partnering in place the OneRiot engine could prove to be a huge boon not only to those looking for realtime information, but to advertisers seeking to capitalize on those searches. The possibilities for behaviorally targetet advertising are immense. But is anyone going to choose to go to OneRiot to do their searches? I have a hard time thinking that they will. They’ll have to partner up with one of the big players to make that engine successful. The good news in this, is that I can see one of the big player making use of the OneRiot engine to bring us not just realtime results, but the standard indexed and ranked results we’re used to, together. That is a very intriguing possibility indeed.

Tweetmeme just doesn’t seem that exciting to me. All they’re doing right now is gathering all the links from the public timeline on Twitter. And while it’s definitely interesting to watch, that’s about the only thing exciting about it. And even that isn’t that exciting, since we’ve seen the very same push technology driving FriendFeed’s new realtime feeds. And since Tweetmeme is only providing the tweets and the links themselves, rather than indexing the actual sites that those links point to, the opportunities for advertising are much fewer, and less valuable in my opinion.

And just where does Google stand in the middle of all of this? For one thing, they admitted that realtime search is their number one priority.  But did they address the knowledge engine of Wolfram Alpha at all? Not that I saw. Perhaps they’re trying to not give it any more attention than it’s going to get anyhow. The real question in my mind is can Google really stay on top of their game? Or have they diverted too much energy into chasing Microsoft’s software market? I honestly thing that Google needs to focus more of its energy on their core business, and possibly on beating Microsoft to the acquisition punch, or they’re going to wind up taking a back seat to the next big thing in search.

And what will the next big thing in search really look like? It will have 4 aspects to it: Better answers to the specific question being asked, more answers from the real time and from all time, less “gamed” by the SEO experts, and it will have and give the necessary data for personally target the experience and the resulting advertising to specific individuals. And that last aspect is the real key – that’s how the new engines make money.

What do you get out of your social media experience? What do you put into it?

As I stated in an earlier post some people are in it simply for the tools, technology for technology’s sake. Others still are in it to garner the little bit of internet fame that they can see from having popular stories on Digg, or trending topics or huge followings on Twitter, or huge amounts of friends on Facebook and Myspace. Though I might be interested in those things from a certain perspective, and I’m certainly a techno-gearhead, that’s not why I participate on social networks.

I do because of the heart, passion, soul and sharing of real life experiences that I give and receive from my friends and acquaintences on these networks. I do it so that if I find myself in an uncomfortable living situation, I can let my network know, and get advice about how to handle the situation. I do it because I know that if something happens to me someone is going to care, about me, personally, and do something to help. I do it so that when someone randomly tweets out that they just gave the ring back to their now ex-fiance, I can be there to see it, and share in that experience, offer some of my heart and love and compassion to the person who said that. I do it because on the same day, I can see yet another tweet from somone else, announce her new engagement. I do it because when I run out of money and have nowhere to stay, I could post that and find some help (from a stranger) within hours. And I do it because not long l after I need help, I’ll see another message that someone I know is “petrified” and drag out of her that she’s about to lose her home, and need whatever help I can offer, whatever I have to give.

Social networking lets me  see pictures of my “real life” friends and their new babies, when I’m too far away to see them. Social media makes it so that I can see how my friends have  grown and developed and matured enough to take that leap that’s scared them for so long, and makes me happy that I can share in the joy of them finding real love in their lives.  Being online together can help heal old wounds that we might have a hard time healing in person, and bring us to new levels of friendship.  Connecting online also creates the possiblilites that I can see pictures from online friends I hardly know and share in not only the joy that they have with their children, but the joy that brings to our entire mutual network; the comments the “likes” and the love that we share as we all participate in the experience.  Our online connections show us what we think if funny, sad, beautiful, and brings this all from fresh perspectives, from everywhere; places we’ve been, places we’re going to, and places we might never see. And perhaps most importantly in my life,  I use social networks because I can meet people from all over the globe, that I could never have met any other way.  You never know where your best friends might come from.

Using social media gives us the opportunity to share with people who aren’t necessarily our friends “in real life” a lot of those things that we would only normally share with our closest of friends. Because we don’t meet these people physically at first, many of our own predjudices that we’re not conscious of don’t come into play so easily. Something about the physical disconnection makes it easier in a lot of ways for us to be more honest, and less guarded. This isn’t always the case, and certainly we have our fair share of phoney-marketer types detracting from this.

Using social media helps us to discover our innate talents and passions in life as well. The network of people around us who haven’t all spent a lot of “in real life” time with us joined together with our network of “in real life” friends that we also see online helps us to be able to see the things about ourselves that we haven’t seen, or weren’t ready to acknowledge. It helps us be real, and honest with ourselves, or painfully exposes us as liars if we are. This whole process allows, and forces us to grow and develop in ourselves and in ways that we hadn’t thought possible, or indeed in many cases that we hadn’t thought of at all.

Most of my life I’ve thought of myself as a geek. I’ve always been something of a storyteller as well, but I’ve certainly never though of myself as a writer. I’ve never thought of myself as a marketer either. My involvment in social networks has taught me that I have a lot to offer as both a writer and a marketer. I would never have discovered this if I didn’t embrace the networking,  and truly give myself to the experience. I would never have met some of the friends that I have today, friends that have challenged me to learn and grow in new ways. 

Why am I telling you all this? As we study the networks and the tools to use them together, it’s important that we not lose sight of why we do it. It’s important that we realize that the tools are so we can experience the message, and spend some of our time together just in the conversation. It’s important that we know who each other are so that we can learn better to communicate, and bring the heart and love and passion that we have into each others’ lives.

How does your involvement in social media change how you think of yourself? How does social media bring the real love and passion into your life? How has your social networking changed your outlook and perspective on life, and how has that changed how you live?