The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — broke from the gate and never let up in a barnburner of a show about the post-Jobs era. Will Google assume the mantle of leadership from an aging Apple, or is this just an evolutionary step along the stream of innovation triggered by the iPhone/iPad?

There’s plenty of data on both sides of this coin. Certainly Google Glass has triggered a lot of the same atmospherics that accompanied Apple’s storming of the Microsoft barricades. Every day we see the wreckage of the PC era float past us as our thoughts shift from Windows to Web to apps. Mobile has won the war for our hearts and minds. As Adam said to Eve: Stand back, we don’t know how big this is going to get.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spared no expense to bring you the finest in up-to-date tech commentary. In other words, we tore into Twitter Music, ignored Facebook Home, dissected the internals of AirPlay, and cashed our Bitcoin checks.

Our attention is a zero sum game, and whether it’s West Wing or Twitter pointers into the musicsphere, how we make our streaming choices will determine who the big winners are. What we’re really waiting for is the tipping point when the streamer artists crossover and recapture the idea that the creators are the real coin of the realm.

@stevegillmor, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — spent a too-quick hour on Facebook Home, Twitter’s new deep linking Cards, and the jousting over Webkit. Individually, these developments represent interesting strategy for the major notification platforms of Google, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook.

But taken together, we’re seeing an important moment of truth. With Facebook pulling a “kindle” by hijacking Android’s lockscreen for its notification engine, suddenly everybody has to get in line. Apple retains its AirPlay gateway to the big screen, but it’s Facebook not Google that threatens iOS’ fit and finish. And just in time for apps, Twitter sets in motion developer innovation linking app to app and eventually the Web, Look out Cleveland, a fork is coming through.

@stevegillmor, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @borthwick, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Live chat stream

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, and Steve Gillmor — went bicoastal with @stevegillmor at @borthwick’s Betaworks Studios in New York City. @scobleizer and @jtaschek held down the West Coast as it threatened to float away in Googlemania. With a touch Chromebook and a Google Glasses video surfacing, at least half the Gang is predicting Apple is in trouble.

Certainly the Googlers get network while a Tim Cooked Apple gets supply chain, but who’s to say (Scoble) that the fun ride is over for ownership of innovation. I think not, fascinated as I am with the amazing platform being nurtured around the iPad Mini and what it augurs for Apple’s move to the streaming cloud.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Apple’s stock price tanked due to their blowout quarter and two-thirds ownership of the U.S. smartphone revenue. @scobleizer gave it a 70% chance that he would bolt the Apple Fanboy ranks by the end of February, but only a 10% chance that an unexpected breakthrough from an unexpected source would change the world by the end of 2013.

That, of course, leaves Google to account for Robert’s waning enthusiasm for Tim Cook’s lack of leadership and lack of SteveJobsness. But what Jobs triggered was a continuous wave of innovation driven by the engaged forces of the Google/Apple contest. And as @jtaschek points out, fostered in the competitive playground of the carriers where innovation in bandwidth fuels the social players. You don’t have to wait for the end of February to place your own bet on the percentage likelihood of disruption in this year of dreams coming true.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — served up the Sinofsky firing as the main course of a dissection of the Microsoft playbook or lack of it. Who knew that it would be Steve Ballmer to announce just how screwed Microsoft is. Windows 8 solves the wrong problem, while Android keeps several steps ahead with its Nexus platform.

And the iPad Mini is like a flu shot, protecting Apple from the worst of Android’s disruption while giving the crossover market a BYOT device for the trip to and from the office. As Office attempts to treat each platform as peanut butter, eventually they’ll realize they’ve been jammed. The final firewall: PowerPoint.

@stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @kteare

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — counted their pennies as Apple, Microsoft, and Google weighed in to the Tablet Sweepstakes with new entries. Apple’s iPad Mini captured two of the Gang’s wallet, while none seemed ready for the Surface or other Windows 8 entries. Supposedly a Nexus 10 is due on Monday from Samsung at a Google event.

Whether or not the Apple financial results indicate weakness in for the iPad, iPhone 5 continues to outstrip the ability to make the device. With @scobleizer saving for his Google Glasses, it will be an interesting pool to predict when Robert caves on the Mini. Google seems challenged to wrangle the carriers and Microsoft may be dividing its partners with the home-grown Surface. Apologies for the 60 cycle ground loop, too. This LTE Era needs to settle down soon.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @kteare, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I read the news today oh boy. Well actually, I didn’t. In a realtime Twitter world where everything looks like news, none of it is. The Steve Jobs anniversary stories are just one measure of this logjam, but something deeper than his tragic demise is troubling the technology business. What news is and why we crave it are being disrespected by Twitter’s recent moves, and the result may be a Twitter spring with unintended consequences.

The fact that Twitter needs to make enough money to justify its venture investment is not news either. Today’s post-Facebook IPO climate is seen as a watershed not unlike the aftermath of the AOL/Time Warner collapse. But history is no guide to the about-to-be-invented, which is what Twitter is. Attempts to rein Twitter in, to close the borders and declare dividends, to capture and bottle the spirit of the times, these are all understandable and yet fundamentally misguided attempts to change the course of biochemical inevitability.

Take @mentions, which is what these guys are trying to do. By shutting down alternative clients in favor of in-house products, the Twitter brain trust is flaunting their misunderstanding of the power of their network. Make no mistake: it is their network, not ours. We only ratify that fact by contributing to it, by repetitively going to the well like some lab rats in search of pellets of insight in a sea of emotional backwash. The amazing and durable fact is that we continue to find what we are looking for, no matter what the latest board or market cap shuffle suggests.

They own the network; get over it. Forget the idea that there is a moral approach to a popular service. Focus instead on the primal urges that drive our search for news, for the alchemic spark that keeps us alive in the face of death. It’s not that we resent Twitter in search of success. It’s the opposite: we are betting on that success, fearful that they are going to screw it up. Hmm, let me just use this pocket knife to find out where the gold is coming from in this goose here.

@mentions are the life blood of Twitter, the refugee of the death of Track from the first of the purges that didn’t work. @mentions form a dynamic frame on which to exercise the power of the social graph in realtime, not moderated algorithmically generated thanks-we’ll-take-it-from-here Facebook time. We are the sum of what we yearn for, that chemical soup of destiny, that thing the great artists strive for in their processes and silences. You can’t take @mentions from us, because we haven’t birthed the next ones yet. You can’t squelch the human spirit, not even for one second.

I remember one night in the dark years ago, when Sam Kinison raged against the status quo in a vile, obscenity-laden deeply angry and gasping-for-air hilarious howl of insanity so inspired that it made us feel ashamed to agree with it so much. That’s what became apparent with Twitter at some point: that we could suddenly tap into this realtime macro mind, this living and breathing planet, this moment in time that made news a secondary pursuit, homework to prepare us for the next leap into the stream.

But you Twitter guys have always thought you could manage this grasping of the third rail. No, your job has always been to figure out how to keep it running, just ahead of the voracious demand you unleashed. We don’t blame you for the FailWhale, for the media footsie of the Suggested User List, for any of the Nineteen Eighty-Four-ish Newspeak (“We’re bombing Track to save it”) and so on. No, we loved you for your inadvertent transparency and hoped you’d come to see the futility of standing up to Jack’s SMS monster.

Here, once again, is why @mentions are important. Not only do they trigger realtime notifications on the dominant unified platform of mobile, they can be mined and massaged into the best possible filter based on the cascading intersections of your, yours, and theirs’ social graphs. Who you follow, @mention, and retweet, and then again who they follow, @mention, and retweet forms a taxonomy that will extract a much higher degree of value from the stream. The key to this working is our ability to interact over time with this cloud and keep it alive in a form that is freely redistributable.

This is where Twitter is attempting to save us from ourselves, by constraining the choice of nodes to which we have access. It doesn’t even matter about existing applications that are being terminated. It’s really about applications that have not been thought of yet, as of right this minute. It’s the ideas we as a living breathing entity born of realtime are about to have that give us the incentive of publishing to the network of networks. What you don’t want to do will never happen. Hey, Dick? Riddle me that.

Cutting off the incentive for @mentions is like administering a small electric shock when you are about to take a bite of food. Gee, that burger looks good but if I’m gonna get shocked for it maybe I should hold out for steak. If I’m a developer or entrepreneur looking to scratch an itch or a customer’s need, and I see Twitter undermining its central reason for existence, I keep looking. Not that Facebook is going to come to the rescue either. You have to have unlimited time like Scoble, really actually be Scoble, to make Facebook into an opaque semi-replica of the network of record.

Nope. The biggest problem Twitter has is that they can’t figure out how to compete with the Twitter that we think it is. We think it’s some supercharged email/IM replacement, and of course we are right. What does Twitter have that email/IM doesn’t have? @mentions. What are @mentions good for? Creating an elastic separate stream of contextual social data, one that is open to be applied to any service at the customer’s will. Freely redistributable. Not the content, but the context. Keep the content, Dick. We already gave it to you. Free the context.

If you think this is some geeky early adopter punditry noise, think again. Remember Microsoft. Big company, Pacific Northwest, richest man in the world yadda yadda. Microsoft foundered on freely redistributable. Arguably the Microsoft tablet machines, not the Surface but 10 years ago, offered much of the value proposition of the iPad if any software was actually released for the platform. In fact, one such application existed, called OneNote. But for whatever reason, the software was quarantined as part of Office. No freely redistributable player was forthcoming. No usage, no metadata, no context.

Apple, on the other hand, shipped Maps, Search, Mail, Web apps, iTunes, freely redistributable video (read Not Flash) bundled with iOS and the devices. I would never have bought an iPod were it not for the ability to rip CDs to the device. The iPhone’s unblocking of WiFi from carrier resistance was the central disruption of the phone and then the iPad. It’s not freely redistributable; it’s that plus carrier acceptance.

Steve Jobs didn’t just know this; he invented it. And by the way, what’s this noise about Jack Dorsey’s role being “reduced” again at Twitter for being difficult and indecisive? Who was more difficult and indecisive than Jobs, right up until he decided? Luckily for Dick Costolo, nothing less than this has any better chance of giving Jack the room he needs to double down on Twitter where it counts. Jack was the only guy at Twitter to give us a straight answer about Track back when it mattered. He loves Track. Twitter is his scratched itch.

Dick and Jack are the right guys for the job of keeping Twitter from eating its young. They are smart, funny, and honest. They understand we are not going to stop wanting to know what’s new, or flee to a nonexistent competitor, or do anything to make Twitter vulnerable to economic imbalance. The presidential debate saw record traffic, as Romney did an amazing job of energizing the sleeping Democratic base. Perhaps Costolo is just energizing the @mention base. If so, @dickc and @jack, here’s the question: what tools will you provide to make @mention data freely redistributable?

[Photo of Jack Dorsey @ BearHugCamp by Andrew Mager]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — spent way too much time obsessing over the relative value of pictures in the social stream. My theory is that Twitter’s compact signals and social graph add up to much more than Facebook’s cat pictures decorated with Likes, comments, shares, and tags. It would be a tossup argument but for Twitter’s comprehensive dismantling of the very third party apps that turn the service into the realtime message bus.

What really pisses me off is that Twitter execs who should and do know better don’t realize they’re emasculating the service with no ability to replace the losses with their own apps. After all, it’s the workarounds that brought Twitter to life, back when we first realized how powerful an impact the open message bus would have on world events. It’s almost like we’re about to see a Twitter Spring, where the data we infer through @messages and direct messages will be invisible to all those who lock us out of the tools to surface these rare and extraordinary signals. In other words, thanks Jack and Dick.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Gillmor Gang — John Taschek, Adam Bosworth, Robert Scoble, Victoria Barret, and Steve Gillmor — convened at Dreamforce 2012 to honor the burgeoning Celebration of the Cloud. As Marc Benioff and Sir Richard Branson strolled past the Salesforce Live studio at the entrance to the Expo floor, the Gang recalled the birth of Web Services that @benioff correctly construed as the beginning of the end for monolithic software.

Of course, as @adambosworth points out, social needs a tipping point where enough people congregate and contribute to make it compelling to return. And as Forbes’ @victoriabarret says, the 95 thousand at Dreamforce and more on the Web confirm social is no longer cute or trivial. When Virgin America suggests tweeting or Facebooking your concerns rather than via an 800 number, you know the handwriting is on the Wall.

@stevegillmor, @adambosworth, @victoriabarret, @scobleizer, @jtaschek

Produced by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor and Salesforce Live

Article courtesy of TechCrunch