Weather in San Francisco Bay Area is especially nice and is likely to remain that way for a while. It makes perfect sense to sit outside and talk about the hottest topic to hit the Innerwebs: Data portability/interoperability. Whether it is Facebook, MySpace or Google, each has been coming up with ways to control the user. Somehow the noise has gotten ahead of the fact, and I would like to meet smart people about this over the weekend.

A frank conversation with non-conflicted parties that would help me write smarter and conceptually sound posts going forward. I propose: 2.30 PM at Starbucks on Clay & Battery in San Francisco. I will buy coffee and cakes, but please don’t pitch me your company. I want some honesty about this topic.

Networking has always been a high art in business. Just ask Susan Roane, my mentor and author of the seminal tome, “How to Work a Room.” (I know a handful of VCs and startup kings on Sand Hill Road who have her book tucked into a drawer.) I’ve been showcasing Roane’s lessons for founders in my Found|READ series, “What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School.”

By now it’s time to address the latest, and arguably the most powerful, networking tool in any founders’ arsenal: Twitter. It’s simple. If you’re not “tweeting,” you’re missing half the conversation. Just ask Sarah Lacy. (How different Lacy’s now-infamous SXSW interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg might have been had she been plugged into the tweets flying around the conference room floor!) Don’t know how to use Twitter? No sweat. Here are my 8 Tips for How to Work a Twitter Party.
(Photo credit: News.com. SXSW Tweeters celebrating before the ill-fated Zuckerberg interview.)

First things first: For founders, the goal of Twittering isn’t to tell people what we ate for lunch, but to get technology influencers — like Dave McClure, Mike Arrington or Guy Kawasaki — to read and respond to our Twitter feeds. In Twitter nomenclature, this is called “following.”

1. Don’t be afraid to Tweet above your head. McClure is an Alpha Tweeter. One tweet from Dave is like a TechCrunch link two years ago. But you’re no one, so you’ll have to tweet Dave five times to get him to reciprocate, and do something really interesting for him to “follow” your feed. Reciprocity is also a must. Guy Kawasaki, a top Twitter-er, takes this to the extreme, following every Tweeter who follows him. So do I. Use text message updates to keep tabs on those tweeting you.

2. Watch your Twitter ratios. Spammers have a bad follower-to-following ratio, so don’t randomly follow 20, 200 or 2,000 people without some Twittering under your belt. Similarly if you’re twittering a little too substantively, or have a banal topic, then expect to have a horrible updates-to-follower ratio. (my updates-to-followers ratio is bad because I tweet about FICO scores, a topic so dull that my “ABC News” segment on YouTube only has 12 views.)

3. Leverage what’s going on. If you knew HP would buy EDS a week ago or a month ago, then tweet and claim credit. I’m not joking, people. Do this. Did you walk in on a powerSet 2.0 pitch at Peet’s on University Ave.? Twitter that too.

4. Move your Twitter conversation(s) off-line. Good meet-ups can start with Twitter marketing. Good examples include Startup School or Sarah’s book-signing in San Francisco. Twitter loves Y Combinator and vice versa! Tweet your friends to organize a pre-party (like a breakfast at Fraiche) and voila! One day prior to your event, and the RSVP list on Facebook is 50 percent over capacity.

5. Migrate your real-world conversation to Twitter. At ad-tech, I was with Oren Michels, Scott Rafer, Owen Thomas and others. During post-conference parties, people tweeted back-and-forth other constantly. What does this do? It stimulates more face-to-face conversation! Indeed, working the Twitter party makes the real party you’re at better, bigger and better-documented.

6. Time your tweets. A great man once told me: “Be a vacation in your interactions with people.” He meant: “Don’t tax your conversation partners.” Is reading your Twitter feed a part-time job, or a little beach break that people can take from right inside their cube at work? For maximum impact, release your tweets with the time of day in mind. News-related tweets fly in the morning. Post-lunch tweets should be on the lighter side.

7. Pre-write some of your material. There is nothing wrong with pre-composing a few impromtu tweets. Think improv comedians don’t prepare? So don’t post stream of consciousness to your Twitter. And whatever you do, don’t tweet with a buzz on.

8. Work the Twitter Room for product development. A product manager for pbWiki, Kris, was recently using Twitter to collect ideas for product tweaks. So I chimed in with a tweet requesting that updates to my company’s 400 pbWiki pages be distributed via email, but only to those who’ve actually edited those pages. Hey Dave Weekly (founder of pbWiki), did you know your employees work the Twitter Party for your benefit?

Written by Larry Chiang, founder of duck9.com, which helps college students improve their credit ratings. He is also a frequent contributor to Found|READ.

Microsoft will hold its fourth Microsoft Research Silicon Valley Road Show at its campus in Mountain View, Calif., next Thursday, May 22. The event, which will showcase examples of all kinds of cool things the Redmond giant is working on, including an Xbox-based programming game for kids to program a virtual robot, is free to the public. But space is limited, so go here to register and enter the RSVP code “RoadShow08.”

In what is proving to be yet another high-profile Metro Wi-Fi failure, MetroFi, a San Jose-based startup that raised over $15 million from Sevin Rosen and August Capital, is close to shutting down, according to WiFi NetNews and MuniWireless, two blogs that follow the MuniFi industry closely.

MetroFi is trying to sell its citywide Wi-Fi networks in Portland (Oregon), Aurora and Naperville (Illinois) and Santa Clara, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Foster City and Concord (California). MetroFi founder, Chuck Haas, says he is also exploring the sale of MetroFi itself to a third party.

MetroFi had started to offer ad-supported wireless access in many cities, except it couldn’t find any traction. I think with all the noise Google made, even that company has backed away from WiFi-access based on advertising. There were a few others that have found going really tough when it comes to MuniFi. The trials and tribulations of EarthLink are well known by now. Glenn Fleishman blames EarthLink for the current spate of industry problems. And he’s not far off the mark, though I think the sector became a victim of its overambition.

EarthLink was in many ways largely responsible for the mess that all Wi-Fi providers found themselves in last year by offering to build Philadelphia’s network back in 2005 at no cost to the city—in fact, paying the city and the local utility fees. That set the stage for nearly all the RFPs that followed where, if EarthLink were a bidder or the city was aware of the alternatives, the notion was that no city dollars would be spent, even if taxpayer money wasn’t “at risk”—that is, even if a city could save money by switching current line items in their telecom and data budget to a wireless network.

However great an idea it might have seemed when it was first conceived, the One Laptop Per Child project has never been something I’ve been able to wrap my head around. I’ve always felt, despite the backers’ good intentions, that it was being shoved down the throats of emerging economies with more dire needs, such as food, clean water and schools. I was dismissed as a naysayer by many, mostly for not grokking how computing can revolutionize nations. But I haven’t changed my mind. This project comes off like a vanity play for the elite, who perhaps can’t grok the meaning of living within minimal means.

That personal opinion aside, OLPC has also had its share of teething problems, as we have chronicled time and again. First it was met with strong opposition from folks like Intel, who went on to create their own rival platforms, mostly to disrupt the whole OLPC movement. At the same time, Moore’s Law brought about the rise of low-cost Internet devices like the ASUS EEE PC, which I think are only going to get cheaper as time goes by.

The biggest blows, however, are proving to be self-inflicted. Today OStatic notes that OLPC’s Open Sugar platform is going to be adopted for new hardware platforms by Sugar Labs, the new effort of OLPC former president Walter Bender and one where he is joined by many of the core Sugar developers.

I can’t help but wonder if there’s a link between Bender’s efforts at Sugar Labs and yesterday’s announcement that Windows XP is going to be available on OLPC machines and that Sugar will be ported over to Windows. (Yeah, right…not with most of the people off doing Sugar Labs.) The availability of Windows XP is different from what the people behind OLPC had set out to do — build a truly open, low-cost connected computing device for kids around the world. The press materials don’t make it clear how much Microsoft is going to pocket.

There are some who might point to the low-cost hardware — $180 a pop — as reason for people to buy OLPCs for kids in emerging economies, but how will these machines compete with low-end computers and Internet devices that will run using Intel’s Atom devices?

I think this is the end of OLPC as we know it, even though I’m sure that almost all of you would disagree with me.

Bonus Reading:

* What you can learn from the sad state of OLPC.
* The unintended consequences of OLPC

Remember when CPU processor speeds were the driving force behind new computers? Going from a 500 MHz to 1 GHz then 2 GHz machine meant noticeable improvements. Then chip vendors started adding more cores. But for the style of computing consumers use today, it’s not about the CPU anymore.

It’s all about graphics processors. Thanks to today’s visually intensive style of computing, a good GPU can improve the user experience much better than a fast CPU. In the data center certain tasks are moving from commodity CPU boxes to GPUs, meaning that over the next year or two, more of them will be sold for corporate computing use.

That’s why Intel is pushing graphics chips such as Larrabee, while AMD is set to unveil integrated chipsets that combine CPUs with GPUs, the result of its acquisition of ATI in 2009. All of this was driven home for me during a trip to Nvidia a few weeks ago, where I saw, side-by-side, the difference between a computer with a super-fast CPU and a computer with a slower CPU but a high-end GPU.

Of course, the demo was optimized for graphics-intense programs (I didn’t see any spreadsheets), but the movies, games and transcoding were all impressive, and more akin to the things I use my laptop for nowadays anyhow. And then the Nvidia guys dropped a bomb on me.

All PDF documents now run through the graphics processor, they told me, as does Google Earth and multiple other web applications. The same goes for PowerPoint slides, Word and other parts of Microsoft Office, starting with Office 2007. On Macs, the visual interface on the file system is handled through the GPU, which makes flipping through thousands of photos and movies much easier. On the consumer side, the rise of the such graphical interfaces helps people visually navigate through ever-increasing amounts of information.

Nvidia and AMD probably have the most to gain from this shift in the consumer field, but Intel won’t be sitting out. However, on the enterprise side is where a GPU might offer a lot more value when it comes to rapid information processing. GPUs are good for applications that require a processor to crunch a lot of data in parallel; they’re not good for step-by-step processes that require decision-making at each step.

So Nvidia doesn’t actually want to kill CPUs so much as have its GPUs shoulder some of the load in corporate data centers that are providing transcoding services and running database queries and Monte Carlo simulations. This heterogeneous computing environment will be more expensive than the Google-like x86 server farms, but certain industries have already shown they will pay for specialized processing in certain areas. Financial institutions, for example, that have deployed servers using Sun’s Niagara chips or Azul Systems’ many-core boxes for high-end computing pay more for faster processing.

As the large content vendors and even carriers try to deploy media content in multiple formats for televisions, personal computers and mobile phones over IP networks, they’ll either have to pay more for storing those multiple versions or pay for real-time transcoding, either in the data center or on the network. The increasing delivery of visual media over an IP network and the increasing amount of electronics data stored in corporate databases all represent an opportunity for GPUs that mean the chips might move out of the graphic niche.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.

• NewTeeVee: The men behind Obama Girl are going to the movies.
• NewTeeVee: Quincy Smith Q&A: CNET, EQAL and embeds.
• WebWorkerDaily: Do apps like TwitterFone signal the future?
• OStatic: How to download and save web videos, the Firefox way.
• WebWorkerDaily: Putting VoIP to work.

Finally, a wireless company makes a smart acquisition. Vodafone has acquired Danish wireless address book company Zyb, whose service I have often used to keep my growing array of mobile phones synchronized, for 31.5 million euros, or roughly $49 million. Zyb had raised around $4.7 million in VC funds, with Nordic Venture Partners the biggest investor. This deal is also another win for Morten Lund, who was an early investor not just in Zyb but in Skype.

Vodafone is making a lot of noise about using Zyb’s social networking abilities for its mobile platform, but this is utter rubbish, and distracts from what Zyb is really good for: backing up your address book — a crucial service these days, given how quickly people switch their phones.

Zyb is the smartest way to keep your contacts up-to-date; it’s even (in some cases) a decent option for syncing your calendars. This will help boost customer satisfaction, thanks to seamless switching between phones. I hope Vodafone keeps it free and doesn’t revert to the carrier philosophy of greed-before customer happiness.

While Zyb’s acquisition by Vodafone dovetails with my long-standing belief that the real social network is the address book on our mobile phones, as things currently stand, Zyb is not the answer to Vodafone’s prayers. The company has its issues: Zyb’s downtime, for example, is worse that my pre-January 2008 track record of going to a gym. The company recently bought social networking company, Imity, but how that works out remains to be seen. Sure, Zyb has some average sharing features that allow you to send messages and photos. But as I said, a great connected address book — nothing more, and nothing less.

P.S.: Does anyone else find something intriguing about two address books companies being snapped up by telcos/broadband providers, specifically Vodafone buying Zyb and Comcast snapping up Plaxo? If this is a trend, who is the next to go, and where? Let the speculation begin.

Qualcomm has spent 8.3 million pounds ($16.2 million) buying 40 MHz of L-band spectrum in the U.K., which the company could use for its MediaFLO mobile television or other two-way wireless data services. However, the wireless chipmaker’s overseas shopping spree might end at the borders of continental Europe.

That’s because the EU is encouraging its member countries to adopt the DVB-H standard. Lucky for Qualcomm, those cheeky Brits decided to keep the auction open to a variety of mobile standards. That gives Qualcomm a chance to keep selling pricey intellectual property licenses for its proprietary MediaFLO technology. With all the vendors choosing the open LTE standard, it has to find some way to goose those royalties.

Don’t blame me for getting caught up in the whole hoopla around media-buying-media…we media types are known for being narcissists. Blame me for not being able to blog about the new beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, which has built-in P2P features and is able to save files to the local drives. I was reminded by Hank Williams about the new release, and its big impact on the world of video in particular and other web apps in general.As some of you might remember, I wrote about Adobe’s P2P ambitions that revolved around buying a company called Amicima.

Through LinkedIn, we were able to find that amicima co-founder Mathew Kaufman has been working as Senior Computer Scientist for Adobe since October 2006. His co-founder, Michael Thornburgh, is also said to be at Adobe. Both of them have vast experience in networking and P2P technologies. The two of them worked at Tycho Networks, and later at DSL.net, after that company acquired Tycho.

I have been following this closely, and my sources say that this is a solid technology with the potential to seriously disrupt the CDN market, especially those companies that rely on clients. I wonder, for example, what will happen to RedSwoosh, which is owned by Akamai, or to other, similar providers of P2P-based client services. I think one shouldn’t get caught up in the CDN-killer aspect of this technology.

From what I have learnt, there are some elements of this technology that make it necessary to have a server infrastructure for situations where traversing NAT’s/Firewalls isn’t possible. It also needs a centralized registrar is also needed that maintains the ID’s of all the P2P clients (nodes) connected to a service. In other words, a CDN operator work with Adobe, charging for traffic that goes through their proxies as and when needed by the Flash 10. By the way Adobe has an arrangement with Kontiki, a CDN operator of sorts.

Williams’ post digs deeper into this in a thoughtful, intelligent way. “[I]s the innovation that will be unleashed by making P2P technology an assumed part of the web protocol stack?” he wonders. (I think that’s why it’s important that we start harping about upload speeds on our broadband connections.)

The reason we should pay attention to this product is Adobe’s distribution strength. The company can easily upgrade its Flash clients and instantly become owner of one of the largest P2P services. What that means is that now anyone can contemplate a Joost-like service that works within a browser. Using AIR to extend those P2P abilities to the desktop would be fairly easy as well. Ironically, both Joost and Jaman have spent considerable time, money and attention doing this.

The early version of Flash is rather simple, but it does offer a way to lower bandwidth costs while still delivering high-quality video. In addition, companies like Tokbox (our story) and Woome (NTV story) can add more functionality, such as cheaper, live video-voice service, without spending too much money.

It’s clear that Adobe is not going to become a huge P2P service overnight. But this release does portend to an interesting future.

PS: If anyone wants to share their thoughts, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

We are inching close to Structure 08 and are trying hard to round out the speaker list and the agenda. Our friends at Techcrunch wrote nice things about the upcoming conference on their blog today. I have been spending a lot of time researching the topics so we can make the event more fun and informative. The conference will be held on June 25, 2008 at the Mission Bay Center in San Francisco. More details are here. For ticket sales, click here.

The New York Times had an article today about the loss of women in the science and technology fields as they hit their 30s and beyond. It cites a report that blames a macho culture intrinsic to those fields. But it’s possible that readers in the tech field missed it as it only ran in the Style section of the paper’s web site rather than the Technology section. Because apparently the loss of female programming and engineering talent has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with the latest swimsuits. An article on the Wii Fit however, was deemed worthy of appearing in both sections.

I actually think the “macho culture” inherent to these fields has less to do with the lack of women sticking around than the persistent assumption that’s behind the NYTimes confining the article to the Style pages. The assumption is that work-life balance is a female issue. Aside from tales of overt sexual harassment, the main trends that emerge in the report are that women need to “act like a man” to succeed (code for working a lot and not talking about family), and that the hours are not conducive for working mothers.

Women aren’t less capable of doing math and science, but they do tend to be less available when it comes to working long hours after having a child, unless they have a husband with a 9-5 job. Those all-night programming sessions or the week-long visits to foreign fabs to make sure a chip design is implemented correctly are costly to families. For the type of competitive person who ends up in the technology field, deciding between giving 110 percent to solving a technological problem and giving 90 or even 100 percent when junior is sick, is too frustrating. So they back off, because if the game is rigged so you can’t win, smart people pick a new game.

These women aren’t dumb, but their employers might be. The Silicon Valley startup culture demands a person give 110 percent and can be gruelingly inflexible. Academia and research labs are similar. But after a child –or maybe a heart attack — people tend to look at the rigged game and decline to play. So either the culture in technology will be forced to change, or it will continue to feed on canon fodder in the form of youth and single men. Regardless, it’s not just a female problem.

There is a big brouhaha today over Cox Communications blocking BitTorrent traffic, leading to outrage over what amounts to interference with the open Internet. The brouhaha is the result of a research study by Max Planck Institute, which found Cox, Comcast and (Singapore’s) StarHub to be anti-BitTorrent. There are some issues with this study, however — I, for one, (unlike DSL Reports) find it hard to swallow that there are no infringing phone companies.

Why is everyone surprised? I’m sure not. Cox admitted shaping traffic when we asked them about it back in October 2007, though they didn’t single out BitTorrent.

The publicity-hungry not-for-profits organizations do, however, bring up the issue of an open Internet, which is worthy of our attention — and anger — as consumers. But we need to focus our ire on the people who have helped create this mess — not ask them to get us out of it, as the Free Press proposes by suggesting that the FCC should intervene. FreePress Policy Director Ben Scott said:

“Consumers have no reason left to trust their cable company. This independent study confirms that Comcast is still blocking its customers from using popular applications — despite the FCC’s investigation and widespread public outrage…Congress and the FCC must urgently pursue the complaints against network providers.”

But this whole problem is the FCC’s making. The org, under Chairman Kevin Martin and others, has systematically dismantled broadband competition and paved the way for a duopoly (of cable and phone companies.) Martin’s predecessor claimed that broadband over power lines was a viable alternative to cable and DSL technologies that would bring in new competitors. Instead, this duopoly has thrived, and is the reason that the incumbents indulge in anti-consumer behavior. If there was thriving competition, and the cable and phone companies had to work for a living, BitTorrent blocking wouldn’t be an issue. Bandwidth would be plentiful, as it is in other developed and emerging telecom economies.

Unfortunately a lot of people seem to be falling for Martin’s nice guy act, failing to realize that it’s just a ploy for him to build some political capital before he tries to get elected to Congress to subvert the system even further. The blame lies squarely with Martin and others in the FCC: The politicians have failed their constituency and done nothing to foster real competition in the U.S. when it comes to broadband.

We’ve never really had true broadband competition, which is in my mind the real problem. What we need is a whole new approach to legislation and a brand-new FCC, one that is not encumbered by personal political ambitions and beholden to lobbyists. An FCC that puts the people first. It’s as simple as that.

This is hilarious. Google ignores MySpace. Facebook blocks Google’s Friend Connect.

Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

They all think they are open. Google and Facebook trying to out anti-open each other.

MySpace this week won a ruling against Samford Wallace and Walter Rines, reinforcing the fact that there’s no love lost between big web sites and spammers. But it’s also a sign of an escalation of the war on spam.

Spammers are finding virgin territory in emerging messaging tools, including SMS and social networks. Ferris Research projects that Americans will receive 1.5 billion unsolicited text messages in 2008, double the number sent in 2006. And Nielsen calls mobile social networking the next big thing, estimating 2.8 million unique mobile MySpace users and 1.8 million mobile Facebook users in December 2007.

According to antispam firm Cloudmark, spammers are already embracing these new technologies: Between 15 percent and 30 percent of friend requests on some of the largest social networks lead to a spammy profile.

“A lot of people in antispam thought that the reason we have such a bad spam problem is that you can’t pin a reputation on the original individual who sent the mail, and that maybe social networks would be able to remediate that,” said Cloudmark researcher Adam O’Donnell. “But one of the main uses of social networks is getting back in touch with someone you have no real connection to, so you need to be able to leave that vector open for someone to friend you.”

This is an increasingly popular approach for spammers, who create an account and try to friend as many people as possible, then wait for people to view their profiles — which contain spam or links to other sites.

With a huge variety of ways to put content online, those sites can be almost anywhere. MessageLabs‘ Matt Sergeant calls Google Docs “the perfect way to spam,” explaining that hyperlinks in an unsolicited message might go to a Google Docs file containing Google Analytics’ tracking code, rather than a spammer’s server.

Spammers aren’t just pushing pharmaceutical sales, either; increasingly, the site recipients visit tries to inject malware that compromises a visitor’s machine. That machine then becomes a tool for denial-of-service attacks and sending spam, and may be used for keyboard logging and financial phishing. “There’s multiple products being pushed over the spam side,” said O’Donnell.

Neither Om nor I are shy about talking infrastructure, but the High Scalability blog has gone totally geek and parsed the details of how Facebook plans to scale its new Jabber chat service to 70 million members using a hella lot of servers and Erlang. As Sandy Jen over at Meebo can tell you, chat is a challenge to scale because it requires a constantly open connection to the servers and low latency. That’s a recipe for a lot of hardware and some flexible architecture. Good thing Facebook has $100 million to spend, but bad news for the firm if the money spigot closes.

If this story interests you then you should definitely check out our upcoming conference, Structure 08.