Scoble Has the FriendFeed Religion!

Robert Scoble is religious. At least when it comes to being an early adopter of Internet technology. He had the Facebook religion. And the Twitter religion. Now he has the fervor for FriendFeed. I doubt it will move him to speaking in tongues, but hopefully he’ll go through a bottle of red and then get a video up with him on the whiteboard talking about how FriendFeed will kill Google.

I’m only mocking Scoble a little bit here in jest. I like early adopters and I admire his energy. Lord knows, I don’t have as much. I was in Fast Company before Scoble, but I was publishing on the Web before him, too. We didn’t call it Blogging back then, we just called it web publishing or having a web site. Back then I had more energy and cared a lot more. But that was 10 years ago and I was younger, dumber and more naïve, too. About two weeks after that Fast Company article came out I realized Microsoft wasn’t really all that interested in what I thought, but as an influencer of the influencers they wanted to make sure I didn’t go putting any wacky ideas into Walt Mossberg’s head.

Anyway, I think the third time may be the charm with Scoble religion. It's not a Google killer, but there’s something to FriendFeed and it goes like this: Facebook may be a better way to stay in touch with your real friends, but if you’re interested in “the conversation”, FriendFeed takes WAY better advantage of Zuckerberg’s notion of the beloved “social graph” than even Facebook does.

Getting to watch a conversation and not just among “your friends” but “friends of friends” who participate is very easy and unique to anything I’ve seen so far.

Under most circumstances for the more mainstream it’s probably just as big of a counter-productive time waster as most of all the other Web 2.0 crap, but in terms of following certain conversations it truly is cool and unique. But like Usenet before it, it's the type of thing that can get screwed up if it actually becomes more mainstream (the same is true for Twitter as well).

While I’m not sure how FriendFeed will make money, AdSense style advertising on FriendFeed seems like it might make more sense than it would on either Twitter or Facebook. I don’t see how that can be bad for FriendFeed. Either way I really hope Scoble goes to the whiteboard with why FriendFeed is a Google Facebook killer! ;-)

Jason Calacanis: One Step Closer to Owning the New York Knicks

I’d kind of like to see it. I remember the glory days of Earl Monroe, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, Willis Reed, etc. The Dolans have run the franchise for far too long now. New blood!

I was going to go with the headline of: “Facebook to buy Mahalo for TEN BILLION DOLLARS?”, but I didn’t want to get the Dolans too excited. People will be all over Robert Scoble for this (watch the videos, they’re worth watching), especially the Web 2.0 dweebs who don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t think the same way as they do.

Scoble predicts in four years time, Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook are going to cause problems for Google.

Though I’m sure it won’t have any impact on Google’s stock price tomorrow and I’m not as convinced Google can’t compete well with what he’s talking about, Scoble is on to something. And hats off to Scoble, as I’d have placed him as one of those Web 2.0 dweebs.

I don’t yet buy as Scoble does that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to do something like Mahalo (and Techmeme and Facebook) itself or just buy them, but I loved where in part 3 he riffed on Yahoo for a bit as being the potential wildcard in all of this. “Watch out for Yahoo!” (about the only thing that would’ve made that any better for me is if he had said, this means YOU Kara Swisher!).

I’m still agnostic on Mahalo, but I like the premise of it a lot and want to see what happens when they have 25K human edited pages. Jason’s play here is the 80-20 rule. He doesn’t plan for Mahalo to be as all encompassing as Google, instead going for the 20% of the searches that probably represent 80% of the search market. Though why Mahalo already has pages on bacon and kielbasa and not TV Ratings is…interesting.

But c’mon, don’t you want to see Calacanis high fiving with Spike Lee during the NBA finals?

Scoble’s plan that you would only find out about the videos via social networking and not Google went south in about 10 minutes (very good natured of Scoble to post the link via twitter himself). If anything Google has gotten better and faster over the last 6 months.

Note to Scoble: More white boarding videos, less blogging. You’re a natural!

Facebook Ads: All about the "Peer Influencing"

"It's called peer influencing," said Chad Stoller, director-emerging platforms at Organic. MediaContacts' Mr. Nyatsambo gives an example of what he said would be an incredibly valuable tool: Facebook could decipher data such as a group get-together its members have planned and serve advertising related to things the group might need -- pizza, for example. "If [Facebook] can figure out how to anticipate what someone might be looking for, they would be an enormous value," he said in a story from this week's Advertising Age.

This level of sophistication obviously isn't in place yet, or I wouldn't receive ads encouraging me to join the army at 45 years of age.

Facebook Social Networking Experiment w/Ted Leonsis

In the previous post, I did a brief 5 question interview with Ted Leonsis on his thoughts on Facebook. I then asked him if he’d help me in a little experiment to determine the value of Facebook from my perspective as we proceed towards the launch of TVbytheNumbers next month.

I asked Ted to post a link to the interview from his Facebook account to see if his Facebook friends would click on the link. He was gracious enough to participate in my data collection, and went even a step further by posting a link on ted.aol.com.

The experiment generated 175 unique visits, and I have to conclude that Facebook networking certainly works because a full 44% of the visits came from Facebook and at the time of the experiment Ted had about 300 friends on Facebook. That’s about a 25% click thru rate if you assume all of his Facebook friends saw the link, which is not a fair assumption. Ted’s blog has much higher visibility, but I am not surprised by the results because a story about Facebook via Facebook seemingly is more targeted and relevant.

What surprised me though was the bounce rate of ~82%! I definitely buy that this web site has a dumb as hell URL and that the design isn’t so good, but the bounce rate still surprised me (and people coming from Facebook bounced at the same rate as people coming from ted.aol.com). I changed the web design somewhat mid-stream to add a ton more white space and make it far more basic, and the bounce rate was still the same.

While my head can’t quite get around the notion that the majority of people who are interested in Ted & Facebook wouldn’t stick around even a few seconds to read what Ted had to say about Facebook (which I thought was pretty spot-on), regardless of the dopey naming, there is no denying the data. If I had any sense, I would’ve switched to rseidman.blogspot.com prior to the experiment.

Regardless of my shortcomings, there’s also no denying that Facebook is a very powerful tool.

Very special thanks to Ted Leonsis for helping me learn.

Update 08/25/07 7:45p PDT: Sorry to my Firefox (and to some degree Netscape) using friends. The change I made to the site to add more white space completely broke the site for Firefox users. I've switched to the most basic blogger template now and it works w/Firefox.

Interestingly even though almost half the users today were from Firefox, my bounce rate didn't change significantly while the site was broken for Firefox. Before changing the site in the middle of the experiment yesterday afternoon, whatever dumb color scheme I had up worked fine on Firefox.

Five Questions for Ted Leonsis on Facebook

Q1: Ted, you signed up for Facebook less than 3 weeks ago and have already amassed 300 friends via “counter punching”, what do you like most about Facebook so far?

Ted: I am meeting friends I never knew I had or had lost contact with. That is why I like Facebook; it is not helpful to me for connecting with my inner circle-- we are already connected via email, instant messaging, cell phone and face to face communications; but I now hear from many folks that I had lost contact with over the years.

Q2: Steve Case is quoted in the current Newsweek cover story as saying, “Facebook has emerged as the 'it' service and company ... It represents the next logical progression." Do you agree?

Ted: I do think Facebook has the buzz-- mostly because it is a young adult service. It has become a utility rather than a service about love or hipness--or just hooking up-- and it is clean--fast and high on efficiency. I still await a third party app that blows me away for utility. Today, most of the new apps are cool- but empty calories.

Q3: The VC and software development community seem very excited about Facebook being a development platform, but it’s a development platform in a walled garden (similar to AOL’s client software). Do you think there are big opportunities for entrepreneurs via Facebook?

Ted: It is unclear whether on such an intimate setting as Facebook will do well for commerce; chat rooms haven’t welcomed ad businesses; messaging has NOT scaled for commerce and most of the new services on Facebook are nice to haves--not must haves. The jury is still out-- but many developers and VC's will die trying to make this the next big interactive real estate play.

Already I feel my Facebook page has become cluttered with other people's stuff-- Facebook must be vigilant in not allowing too much development and commerce -- as the environment is still young and developing-- opening everything up sounds great in concept but there is risk in that the community may reject a majority of the in your face selling oriented apps.

Q4: As an owner of multiple sports franchises and as a philanthropist/Filmanthropist do you see social networks like Facebook as playing an important part in reaching your business interests and the causes you support?

Ted: I think the newsfeeds and wall and groups functions can be very helpful to sports franchises--any medium that is user generated--authentic and can circle up "passionates" must be understood and embraced by owners of sports teams. My bet is the majority of my friends will end up being fans of my sports teams.

Q5: The Newsweek article referenced above says Case is Facebook friends with Bill Gates. How about you?

Ted: I have asked Bill Gates to add me as a friend--I await his response.

Ted Leonsis is a Vice Chair for AOL, majority owner of the NHL Washington Capitals and the WNBA Washington Mystics as well as a minority owner of the NBA Washington Wizards. He’s also a self-styled “Filmanthropist,” producing the award winning documentary film, Nanking.

Can We Get Everything We Want...for Free?

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about the need for two-way openness. He was referring to the features where you can receive things like Facebook friends’ status updates via RSS. Fred likes that this is available, however it’s not enough for him. He wants two-way openness. He wants to be able to update his status on Facebook via Twitter.

As an end user, I’m right there with Fred Wilson: let me use whatever I want, to do whatever I want! But if I were working at Facebook I’d be scratching my head and thinking, “How the hell are we going to make Fred happy AND generate lots of revenue?”

This, by the way is a problem, for even one-way openness. Especially as RSS usage increases – and I believe this is inevitable because you really can finally create “The Daily Me.”

I read Engadget religiously. But they send full feeds out via RSS, and I never (or hardly ever) actually go to Engadget’s web site. I don’t see ANY of the ads on their site.

I know sites are struggling with full-feed vs. partial feed for this very reason. I’d much rather see Dave Winer focusing on the issue of how to utilize RSS to the fullest and still make money than to worry about Jason Calacanis’ mid-life crisis or Mahalo. And that’s with ONE way communication.

Now enter two way communication. Let’s take Fred’s example. He wants a world where he can find out whatever is happening in his Facebook world via RSS, and he wants to be able to update things via services like Twitter. When will Fred ever actually log on to Facebook? How will Facebook make any money on him?

While Fred and many others (perhaps even me) might be willing to pay $10/mo. for such flexibility, I don’t think the masses would. And maybe that’s the model: Give Fred what he wants, but make him pay.

Will there be a company that rolls up a bunch of great content sites and packages “Full Feed RSS without ads!” for a fee? Will there be subscription models that allow us to use whatever tools we want without actually ever visiting a web site?

I think there will have to be.

A Brief History of Facebook

Kind of. NYT Slipstream column by Jason Pontin.

That lawsuit has no chance and is just more free press for Facebook.

Update: Newsweek hops on the Facebook train with full coverage with this cover story plus the 3 other articles which are linked off of it. Flip-flops didn't make the cover. Sad.

Update 7:59PM 8/11: This just in via TechCrunch: Facebook Source Code Leaked. Scary if true, especially if it gives hackers a way to gain personal information.

You'll Have to Wait Until Christmas for Good Apps on Facebook

So says Stewart Alsop in The Essence of Platformness. Good stuff.

More Facebook

I got a couple of e-mails as a result of the Facebook posting. The general theme of these e-mails was: YOU ARE A TOOL, the applications on Facebook are awesome! Typically I don’t really care if anyone thinks I’m a dope, but I have to acknowledge my Facebook newbishness, and rather than just ignore it I went and investigated some of the applications.

There are definitely some cute and useful applications and as I wrote yesterday I already knew the photo and music sharing apps were popular. There are many applications to give your Facebook profile more utility, but none of them rocked my world in a “Oh My God, how did I live before that!?” sort of way.

I might be a tough critic here because I do love the iPhone, but even with all that the only thing that made me think, “How did I ever do that before THIS came along” is the Bloglines’ feed reader for the iPhone at i.bloglines.com . The reason I feel that way is because it allows me to process much more information faster than I ever processed it before. Nothing on Facebook is hitting me as that life-altering.

Still, it’s a GREAT set-up for Facebook. Facebook has effectively outsourced development at NO cost to Facebook. I see how that’s a good business model for Facebook: free development that increases the usefulness/utility of Facebook leads to more users using Facebook more, leads to…more advertising opportunities.

I’m not sure what the model is for the developers though, so I remain somewhat skeptical on the “Facebook is a development platform” front. The companies that developed the applications are largely transparent to the Facebook user, and there’s no mechanism (apparently) for the developers to advertise within their applications. It appears that the model on the developers side is to use Facebook to create apps that will be used by thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of users, and then figure out how to make money later.

I think I saw that movie already. It’s not a complete tragedy but as I recall, it was only a happy ending for a select few. I think one way or the other we can reasonably conclude there will be a happy ending for Facebook. But for the others trying to leverage Facebook’s coattails, I’m not sure that is a reasonable conclusion at all.

Facebook is for Real

After disengaging from the web digerati for about 5 years, I’ve heard an awful lot about Facebook since pulling my head out of the sand a few months ago.

Mostly what I read about seemed to be the Facebook CEO’s (and apparently just about everyone else who works there) penchant for wearing flip-flops . About a month ago, I tried it out: it wanted access to my e-mail address book and I wasn’t interested in doing that.

But over the last month I’ve been reading about Facebook being the new AOL, and having a valuation of anywhere between a half billion to TEN BILLION DOLLARS. That’s an awful lot of flip-flops.

Then Jason Calacanis declared Facebook Bankruptcy , which I took as the bellwether that Facebook was legitimate. I began my quest for information by asking Jason what he’d miss about Facebook if he stopped using it (his response is here) and extended this research out to informally asking people about their Facebook usage where the opportunity presented itself.

My “research” is highly anecdotal, representing feedback from almost 30 people. There seems to be a line somewhere and I am arbitrarily drawing it at around the age of 30. The under 30 crowd is using Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family and as a way to get dates, get laid, etc. In terms of usage, I don’t get any sense that the Facebook under 30 crowd utilizes Facebook much differently than the MySpace under 30 crowd utilizes MySpace.

But there’s a big difference: the over 30 crowd. While I’m sure the over 30 crowd also uses Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends, get dates, etc., there is an aspect going on with Facebook that never seemed to happen on MySpace. Facebook is being used as a “business networking tool” and people are using it frequently.

While still not giving Facebook access to my contact list, I did add some friends, just to see what would happen. I started small adding 10 people. I figured seven of them would just “add me”, and then I threw in Bill Gates and Steve Case just because..plus, they had Facebook pages. I would’ve added Ted Leonsis, but he didn’t have a Facebook page. Mark Cuban did, but I figure I probably need to come up with some killer application leveraging the Intranet before asking.

Not surprisingly, I didn’t hear back from Bill Gates and Steve Case yet, but what surprised me was just how fast 5 out of my 7 added me. These are all hardworking people with jobs, so they are interacting with their Facebook’s very regularly. Via one friend, I saw someone I used to know 10 years ago, so I added him. The turnaround on that, also very fast.

So Facebook is encroaching on “Linked-In” territory for business networking, and with all the buzz it has going for it, I won’t be surprised to see many more people over 30 adding themselves to Facebook and using it as a cross between social networking, LinkedIn, and the sales contact tools of yore like ACT, Organizer etc. I have heard many people who are seemingly disenchanted with Facebook, but the curious thing, and too Facebook’s credit, all the disenchanted seem to use it anyway.

I still think the predominance of growth in the coming months will be with the under 30 crowd. MySpace is currently getting a lot more usage than Facebook despite all Facebook’s buzz in the Valley. Most of Facebook’s growth is going to come from MySpace users trying out Facebook. But it seems like Facebook has an opportunity with the over 30 crowd that MySpace lacks.

While there is much buzz about Facebook as a development platform, when it came to my informal survey, nobody cared too much about any of these applications , in fact, less than 25% of the people I spoke with used any applications other than what you get by default, and the rest were using the usual suspects (music and photo sharing widgets). I think “Facebook as development platform” is genius in terms of Facebook’s marketing, but in reality, I’m not sure that’s really a big deal at all other than Facebook getting more attention as a result of it and that can’t be bad for Facebook at this point.

Update: Arrington reports on Bear Stearns' analysis (Yahoo Needs Social Networking) and there is some good data on social networking categories, age of users, etc.

For the Love of Orb (and Slingbox, Too!)

This is a very long piece on media liberation otherwise known as easy media portability. This is more rough (and mostly completely unedited) thinking on these topics. What's covered: some of the barriers in general, a brief Orb vs. Slingbox comparison, more 'put your TV on your iPod', and some "Fear of Apple".

There are some Slingbox lovers out there. Some Orb lovers too. There aren't enough of us though. In both cases I think the barrier is currently too steep to reach mass adopter status and not just because either of the products are particularly hard to use, or represent unsolvable technological challenges, but instead because of how people think about stuff and the barriers involved with changing behavior.

The barriers are so hard. For instance, at least the last time I checked, most of the HDTVs hadn't wound up actually hooked up to any type of a set top box (STB) that could provide an HD signal. So you're talking about something were even when someone probably paid more than $1000, the people who bought it didn't wind up ordering the thing from their cable or satellite provider that would actually utilize fully what they just paid for. We can be very strange people.

This challenge may make you scratch your head. It might make you think "nah", but look it up. I think the cable and satellite companies have both stepped up in marketing their HD offerings, so this is changing now. But as of last year, MOST HDTVs were not hooked up to any HD content.

Most "Microsoft Media Center PCs" don't even likely wind up ever getting used as a Media Center PC. Many people buy laptops and desktops without even knowing (or knowing and not caring) that it's a Media Center PC. The first Media Center machine I bought was accidental. I had no idea it was a media center PC until I'd unboxed it and saw it had a TV tuner card built in. Since I had cable already in that room for Internet access, I split the cable and checked it out. I liked it. Then I started experimenting with ORB, and I liked it even more. But I do still have some geeky instincts (I thought I'd lost it for a while), and I like playing around with media portability and figuring out how to get it to work. Most people don't operate like that and never will.

This is even more complex than the traditional challenge of marketing something. Traditional models would be more like AOL and Quicken coming bundled on the Computer. Usually most people ignore most of this stuff too, however, AOL and Quicken can do something that doesn't make any sense for Microsoft to do with the Media Center PCs. AOL and Quicken can send you a post card (or a new shiny CD in the case of AOL) and this marketing makes sense, because if you act on it, these guys know what happens: they get paid.

Microsoft would have gotten more attention if they charged $9.95 a month to actually make the media center usable as a DVR. If it would have charged for the program Guide like TIVO does, way more people would've heard about it because if that would have happened, MSFT would have spent some money on sending people who bought Media Center PCs a postcard. On the other hand, I'm glad they didn't, because having a couple of lifetime program guides with Tivo, I would have probably not tried the Media Center's DVR out.. Similarly, I'm glad that ORB didn't ever charge me a fee.

On the other hand these are the exact same reasons that nobody has really heard of ORB or the Microsoft Media Center. I don't know how important it is for Microsoft to be perceived at the forefront of this or whether it should be important to Microsoft. I conclude that for ORB, its decision is it would rather wait for the right time than burn tens of millions of dollars in marketing as Slingbox must do.

ORB vs. Slingbox

Media Liberation is the concept that if I somehow paid for media already and can store it for my own personal use legally, I ought to be able to have access to it wherever I am.

I have gotten questions from more than one person on why I love ORB so much more than Slingbox. If you already have a TIVO and your goal is to be able to watch live or recorded tv from some remote location, I love Slingbox as much as I love ORB. You want to watch on a laptop, even some phones (sadly, not the iPhone) or any computer connected to the Internet (again, sadly no iPhones), I don't have a problem with Slingbox, though if you want it to work on your Sony PSP, you're better off going with Sony's Location Free Player or whatever they have decided to call this product these days (it's basically a Slingbox made by Sony).

There are two reasons I personally prefer ORB to Slingbox. One, it allows me to fully conceptualize in every way the notion of a media server. Secondly, while Slingbox and its ilk will give me easy remote access to live or recorded tv, I have much more than that in my digital media library. All my songs, pretty much any picture I've ever taken and decided to keep since 1997, live and recorded television, and movies and other DVD-style compliations.

Slingbox only lets me get at a piece of that, but I'd say on an application specific basis, especially if you are already set up with a DVR and all that you want to do is get remote access to live and recorded TV. Slingbox is the not only the path of least resistance, unless you already have a TV tuner card and a version of Microsoft Windows that supports Media Center, Slingbox is cheaper.

As it happened, I did already have a Media Center PC, so I played around with it. While I don't love (or hate) the Media Center interface, I do find the version in Vista an improvement, but in terms of remote access, I do love ORB, because unlike Slingbox, it puts the concept in my head of "put all the stuff I paid for here" and get it whenever/wherever I want. I am very enamored with this concept, and in the end whether content is all physically in one place or whether it's virtually distributed, as long as I can ultimately get to it all easily through one interface, I'll be satisfied. For me, ORB is the thing that most enables the "future vision". But there are yet more barriers than "what's ORB's business model going to be exactly?" I honestly don't know currently and "hope Yahoo lightening strikes twice and Orb.Com becomes the Broadcast.Com of the 2000s!" But there are bigger barriers with the consumers than Orb's business model.

Nobody Really Cares Yet, Including Apple

But for now, while WiFi isn't really free and ubiquitous...how much should Apple care yet?

In theory, the widescreen iPhone (and ultimately stand alone iPod) will be the most popular portable media device ever. But it doesn't easily support streaming presently, I will not be shocked if Apple's implementation of Macromedia's FLASH player for the iPhone still blocks me from streaming live TV. Fortunately for Apple, I was already braced because of Sony. Sony, whose PSP did ultimately get around to supporting FLASH, still managed to block streaming protocols. I can stream to my PSP, but only via additional hardware: Sony's location Free Player, or by a convoluted process where I use the PSP to connect with my Playstation 3 at home, and then use the Playstation 3's web browser to access ORB.

While I realize there is some interest in this, especially among enthusiasts and early adopters, for most people the last paragraph just causes their eyes to roll into the back of their heads. We're clearly still in the early adopter stage with some of this stuff and as a result, interoperability is a big issue that causes too much complexity and costs too much. This is a big barrier.

Ubiquitous access to more or less fast Internet. With the iPhone as it is, if Wifi isn't an option, neither is streaming. While ORB can detect your network speed and size the file appropriately, even if the iPhone currently supported streaming seamlessly, I believe because the Edge network is so slow, the results would be poor. However, I'll be shocked if the next generation of iPhone doesn't come with access to AT&T's faster network and on that network, you could get watchable video on a regular basis.

One barrier aside from interoperability and cost is that none of the installed base of the most popular portable media player currently available (iPhone/iPod) can stream anything. So my vision of all this is still at least a couple of generations more of iPods. And you can be sure the very next generation will include a widescreen/touch screen model. Whether that generation has WiFi is the $64,000 question.

The sooner it does, the sooner my vision will start to take root, and that vision is:

Put Your TV on your iPhone/iPod

Or portable media player of your choice. The one big mistake I think Apple made with the video iPod was not loading the iPods with some video content so that people could get accustomed to the notion of portable video. I did some experiments with loading up iPods and loaning them to people. Anyone I could get to use it, seemed to like it quite a bit. But not everyone was interested in trying it out. But the people who did like it and there were several, wished it was easy to get stuff off their DVRs and onto their iPods and iPhones.

For most people, it's way too hard. I have to be honest, it's often way too hard from me, and I confess on occasion I have downloaded files off the internet. I rationalize the ethics like this: the process of getting it from my DVR to my portable device is lousy. So lousy that it's easier and faster to download it. I can't buy a service to do this. I can't get it from Comcast, Apple*, Tivo, Microsoft or anybody. Maybe Facebook will offer it for $8.95 a month and then I can stand in the "I love Facebook" line like everyone else around here.

*You can subscribe to certain TV shows via iTunes and download them already in iPod format. However, these files are optimized for your TV and will playback in DVD quality should you happen to have an AppleTV, they are not optimized for the small screen and small hard drive and they aren't optimized for cramming as much video content that looks great as you possibly can. Ultimately, this will be resolved either via bigger and bigger flash drives to the point where it wouldn't matter to most people, or Apple and others will figure out how to let the software automatically optimize the content

some stuff you can do with the Zune (though I think it might be through a 3^rd party and not Microsoft) is set up to easily transfer shows you have recorded to the Zune. But the Zune as it exists presently is dead, totally killed off by the iPhone and future generations of iPods. If Microsoft doesn't get it yet, they will soon. Form factor matters and an iPhone fits in any pocket you have way better than a Zune. While Sony is taking its sweet time with the Playstation Portable 2, it's at least making the PSP 1 thinner.

I made an offhand comment to a friend that I thought the iPhone form factor wins, even ultimately for gaming, but I'm not so sure. While I don't get much increased value watching video on the PSP's bigger screen (it's at least a 3^rd bigger than the iPhone's), I haven't played Tiger Woods Golf on the smaller screen. Whether they can get the PSP more iPhone-esque in stature, I don't know but Sony is definitely on to slimming the device, and Microsoft will get there with Zune.

Fear of Apple: Who Will be its Main Competition?

I'm fearful that Apple is locking me in to an all Apple world. It's not a conspiracy, and I don't think I am being paranoid. Apple figured out how to design and manufacture really good portable media players. Now they baked in the phone and the Web browser and the integration is very cool. And because I have to have a phone anyway, and loved and heavily used an iPod already, and love reading stuff on the Web, the integration works out very cool, but that it winds up being such a great "portable DVD" replacement for me personally is more than just icing on the cake.

Apple isn't exactly notorious for being an open platform, and with the iPhone I am already forced into using iTunes for syncing, they probably will ultimately lock me in because as my library is increasingly in iTunes, if Apple can give me a DVR that can then iTunes can figure out how to optimize it for the iPhone and transfer it and charge me for it, that would currently be my path of least resistance.

I conceptually hate the notion of being locked into Apple's products, but as long as its products are actually better my hatred will remain merely conceptual.

Because of "Facebook lovin'", I saw the story where Facebook had acquired a company called Parakey which is run by the people who created the Firefox web browser software and is something called a Web Operating System (WebOS, I think is the correct Jargon). I am too far out of the technology loop to fully grasp what this means, but I think what it means is that someone could manufacture a device with a small video screen (say 3.5") and some flash storage and wifi and have it boot up to a web browser that can also serve as a file access interface (so you can store and then access files on the device for playback). If you threw in a cool touch screen interface and could sell it for around ~$300-$349 and theoretically make some money, I think there's an opportunity – to become the anti-Apple, and build this device to support anything and everything. All file formats, and whatever streams. Make it so the device doesn't care whether you have an Orb or a Slingbox, then market it like crazy to people with Slingbox, ORB, PSP, etc.

Sure, theoretically Apple could just open up to all of that too, though I can't imagine Apple feels like it needs to worry about it right now one way or the other. I think the next generation of AppleTV will give a pretty good signal of what Apple is in a hurry to deal with. If it doesn't change much over the previous model other than some of the specs and it doesn't add-in DVR capabilities of any kind, Apple isn't in a big hurry. I think it may still actually be too early for Apple to care. But I expect the next generation of widescreen iPods will be a big hit, and hopefully that will spur the movement.

I believe the bigger touch screen is the huge leap for the iPod and for the top of the line model, I do not expect the form factor or overall design will change from that version forward very much. They'll have to suck you into the new models with "more flash storage" and "faster WiFi" and "seamless Apple TV integration".

For the average person, the best answer is probably to just wait until Comcast and Apple, Tivo, Orb and who knows, Facebook and Pownce are offering you easier ways to deal with your portable media. By the time you're seeing more than one offer to take your money in return for making your life simpler, the hardware options will all be very much better than they are today and it should be reasonably easy to put your TV on your iPod.

Whether that's all 5, 10 or more years away, I don't know. Hoping that it's 5…