The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn’t matter. Except in electronic condoms.

Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn’t win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks’ Target knockoff doesn’t come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook.

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

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Gabe Rivera, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — play toe jam football in the shadow of the Facebook IPO. Try as we might, we can’t shake the weight of Facebook’s dominance of Techmeme and maybe the fate of the global economy. Greece, move over. @gaberivera joins near the 30 minute mark.

@scobleizer tries a reverse Statue of Liberty play around the forthcoming Samsung phone and the threat to Apple (nonexistent) but our hearts aren’t in it. I fail in a weak attempt to roll up everything under push notification. Face it: our hopes and dreams are now tied to our jobs as feeders of the Facebook Empire.  Please Twitter. Save us.

@stevegillmor, @gaberivera, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – Gabe Rivera, John Taschek, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gilmor. Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — turned off their minds, relaxed, and floated downstream on the push notification inbox of tomorrow. Borrowing a page from the Tibetan Book of Windows, the Gang debated the impossibility of multitasking, the existence of a new uber operating system, and the overall impact of surrendering to the void.

Revolver marked the exact center of the Beatles arc; everything before was prologue, everything after continues to expand as the media is transformed. A quarter of a million may seem like a lot of dollars for playing one song once on a TV show, just as we await the size of the Facebook IPO. Recorded first and sequenced last, Tomorrow Never Knows is the end of the beginning.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

With all the press releases masquerading as news, Techmeme has felt more like Craiglist for articles in the past few months, or is it years. But recently we finally got some real news, when Google of all people released Gdrive. We knew of course that it was coming, but not how it would actually feel when it got here. I haven’t signed up yet, but already it’s a big deal for me.

I haven’t signed up because the iOS versions are not done, or ready, or whatever imminent means. When they are shipped, I’m there. Gdrive is the kind of disruption that lurks beneath the surface, behind the marketing campaign, irrespective of even Google’s position in the market. It is like Gmail was when it started, a harbinger with real muscle that marks the beginning of something bigger than a single vendor.

First of all, it kills Google Docs by inserting those features as menu items in Gdrive. This is a real dagger in Microsoft’s heart, the first direct evidence of a post-document model. Naturally the anklebiters will say documents are not dead, etc. But they are. Where are documents on the iPad? You can get to them through some circituitous route through iTunes or whatever, but really there is no file system exposed to us except at the export level, via email or iCloud or Bluetooth maybe. I kid because Apple is, or has been, serious about this no-USB thing.

The only place this has been a problem for me is when I write this column for Techcrunch and come to the add a picture part of the post creation process. If I come in through the WordPress site via the so-called HTML hole (the Web), the only way I can add a graphic to the library is via the file system. You know, file open oh yeah there is no file open. Luckily I’ve discovered a workaround, namely using the WordPress iPad app to add a photo from the Camera Roll. I have no control over placement or the custom settings Techcrunch uses, but I can go back in through the Web and move things around.

Now look at what Gdrive did to Google Docs. It basically said: there is no such thing as a word processor, or a spreadsheet, or a presentation program. There are only these triggers here that look like file names, locations in virtual space aka the cloud. When I “write” it goes to the cloud, when I “edit” it comes back from the cloud, when I “share” it is replicated out in multiple similar relationships to the cloud. You could say it’s a document that’s being worked with, or you could say the idea or the image or the communication or the consensus exists as an object composed of data and metadata about how the object works.

In other words, the list of things I don’t care about just got longer. I don’t care about the file name, because it is now wrapped in a container that includes the services I can access in addition to the information itself. I don’t care about the metadata, not the names of the people who have access to it or the sharing model that controls that, because it’s dynamic and subject to change as the universe continues to expand or contract or whatever. And I don’t care about the abstraction of the document, the parent object, because all I want to know is what this is about, not how it got here or where it’s going next.

The abstraction I do care about is the push notification. Not coincidently, this is an Android feature that Apple has adopted, one in which I am training myself to trust that if I tap on a notification, it will be smart about what services I want to consume it with. A tweet opens to a post, consuming the citation and identifying the social authority to the advantage of my filter process, whether that’s automated or “manual” or self-learning or socially aware. Not only do I not know the filename or the website of the citation or even whether it’s a post or a video or an application trigger, that lack of knowledge is an asset rather than a limitation. I’ve got an app for all of that, or soon will.

So when Gdrive takes that same approach and renders the features of Google Office irrelevant, they render Office irrelevant too. This is a lesson I’ve learned from my children, who use texting and Skype for communications and the abstraction of Facebook for email. Email for them is a lot like Word docs are for me; I’ll use them if necessary but prefer not to know what the format is or especially what the document type is or ultimately that it is a document at all. When my youngest comes to dinner, she doesn’t hang up because it’s not a call. She’s got a Mindcraft connection piggybacked on Skype and she just tells them she’s going to have dinner. BRB.

Imagine what happens when Gmail gets sucked into the Gdrive vortex. Google has had some problems with this called Buzz and Zap or whatever that Australian thing was (Wave), but Gmail was this thing that was being integrated with other things like social and realtime. Instead, what gets absorbed into Gdrive is the value proposition of Gmail: the idea that you don’t throw anything away, you just find it when or if you need it again. You don’t look for the document, you look for the clues to that idea, that connection, that breadcrumb that leads to the trail of breadcrumbs.

I’m writing this on Word on a Mac, and my wife wants to know whether I want to come with her to drop our youngest off at a dance. Right now I have to email this to myself so I can open this up on my iPad if I want to continue. Gdrive should let me store this directly to the cloud, thereby bypassing the need to know any of those details. If I store my Word documents on Gdrive, they should open up on the Mac in Word. Or maybe in Pages on the iPad. Or in WordPress in the post.

Right now there are interchange issues, and business issues where Apple wants me to stay in iCloud and Google in Gdrive and Microsoft in whatever Mesh is now called. But I don’t care about any of that, and apps will appear that erase those distinctions, at least from my awareness. I will pay for the value of not knowing. Lots of us will.

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — surfed the Social Holodeck for signs of intelligent life and overload. Meanwhile: @scobleizer and his Facebook UnLike engine, @dsearls and the Intention Economy, @kevinmarks on the patents protection racket.

If @jtaschek is right, the Facebook IPO will unleash a startup spending spree the likes of which we’ve never seen. But what I’m waiting for is the app to end all apps, or at least autodelete an old one every time I download a new one. Now that will be an algorithm to apply to the push notification queue.

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – Doc Searls, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Live recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — took the bait and played the Are We in a Bubble game. With Apple’s stock price in free fall, the mobile giant reported another blowout What Me Worry quarter that sent the stock right back up. Meanwhile, Google announced, no, shipped Gdrive, and sent shivers down the collective cloud storage spine.

What Gdrive really does is consolidate Google Office under an attractive layer of collaborative unification, borrowed first from Ray Ozzie’s Mesh service and now emulated by a raft of smaller players bubbling up from Startupville. While we’re all twisting slowly in the Apple wind, the real action is taking place in what the chat room somehow called the Teddy Bear Cloud. It’s the new binky.

@stevegillmor, @dannysullivan, @borthwick, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — drunk on power and app-pacified to the max, a pathetic unanimity in search of an argument, a raised eyebrow less than a real opinion… You get the idea; Keith Teare’s stellar Techcrunch post of last Sunday on Google’s earning call click problem seemed like a great place to continue a comment argument with @kevinmarks.

But lo and behold, it’s not Web or Apps but both. HTML5 may turn out to be the least relevant part of this refactoring of the world around mobile. Hindsight or HipSwitch or Turncoat, the names don’t matter but the services do. Some people (like me) will do anything to avoid searching for an answer, and apps are just what I am looking for: touch and tap services orchestrated via push notification and intelligent predictive caching. Or not.

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

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — have a lot to work with this week: Instagram, a Google+ redesign, and Ann Romney joining Twitter. But if Larry is Larry, who are Moe and Curly? @dbfarber makes a good case for Twitter owning the realtime media; if you make it on Twitter, you can make it anywhere. We don’t know Moe’s business model, but who cares.

That leaves Zuckerberg as Curly, the intellectual whose empire keeps growing no matter what mistakes he seems to make. In fact, those mistakes usually turn out to be ephemeral. Lose trust with overwhelming growth, buy the most phatic startup and its 30 million users. Facebook is betting only a few will bolt, and where are they gonna go anyway? The Three Stooges are beating each other up, but what they’re really doing is keeping Microsoft boxed out of the social party. Nyuk nyuck nyuck.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dbfarber, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Push notification and the fabric it creates are about what comes next. Not what we know, but what we’re about to know. The next step, the one we’re about to take, the moment when the foot is in the air and hasn’t yet figured out exactly where to land. It’s like putting english on a tennis return, or the release of the ball in a pitch, the moment when you commit to whatever the strategy is.

Sometimes it’s about gathering every possible piece of information and then acting with that full authority. Other times it’s about keeping the beginner’s mind, clear of opinion and calculation. What matters is the context — who or what or why we are following. Realtime is not just the up-to-date quality but the metadata that surrounds each object: why do we find this person interesting, what does this information suggest will come next, and so on. Only when we can be reasonably satisfied of the quality of our pipeline can we begin to trust it.

The idea is to establish a wrapper for as wide a swath of input as to create value for all possible objects as they appear. The high value targets are easy to model, relatively speaking. This guy has a track record of being right about things well before the crowd. This guy is funny, this guy is rich (indication of success), this guy is rich (indication of cloistered but networked), this guy is rich but I knew him when he wasn’t.

The problem with these “positive” indicators is that they don’t necessarily coincide with the moment of decision. These objects are imbued with connection, leverage, privilege, comfort, tradition, etc. All things that are valuable except at the moment when the alchemy of the stream is calculated. Alchemy that comes from the mixture of less obviously credible sources, the guy who’s not rich but is funny, the guy who is so reliably wrong that he is a leading indicator of what will work, a thousand wrinkles in the fabric of our social universes.

I’m describing our social cloud, that layer of friendship, acquaintance, irritation, relative, associate, colleague, and downright annoying. Enemies not so much, because of the politics of not mutually following, blocking, lurking around celebrity, and so on. This cloud is a living breathing thing, what JP and others call the Hive Mind. It works at such a speed (as quickly as we can make it go) that the decisions we make about what we think about something are virtually chemical in nature, somewhere just before the brain sends the action to the spinal chord, the moment of the foot in the air.

This is the appeal of the realtime bus, the intersection of who we are as emulated and informed by our cloud, and what we are hearing with our beginner’s mind. Let me be clear: I don’t know what the beginner’s mind is, only what I think it suggests. I have not practiced, may be be misusing this, may be completely on target, doesn’t matter. The intersection of who and what, that matters.

Push notification is what comes out the other end of that calculation. The iPad has established this layer as the central interface of the social intersection. On the desk or laptop, we feel at home in a console, a collection of windows (cough) of multiple cooperating or not processes. The metaphor is to pull information from various sources and push our responses out onto that thoroughfare. We call this thoroughfare the Web, and we love the feeling of control the PC provides.

But then mobile came and shifted the desktop from office or home or TV to right here right now, wherever you go there you are. And the center of the domain shifted from the desktop or the server or the network to the inside of your brain. It no longer is what you knew, it’s all that plus what you are about to know. All of a sudden you’re an airport traffic controller and you can’t fall asleep on the job.

Initially we rebelled against this idea. C’mon, how can you just sit there like Scoble and watch 200,000 tweets stream by? Well, examine why Scoble does it. He’s got the best job in the world, Chief Shiny Objects Officer. He and Rocky roam the virtual world looking for the Next Best App, and test the limits of this insane rush they’re trying to call Big Data. We pay him well for it with our attention, because better him than us to explore out where there’s no frontier.

But what he reports back is that things are not as bad as we might think. He’s like the astronaut landed on a new planet who tentatively removes his helmet to take that first breath of air. When Scoble doesn’t fall over, we breath a sigh of relief and go on with trying to make this work for us. Because Scoble is infected with the possibility of the future, and I for one am inspired by that as well.

Meanwhile, the iPad. While it is comforting to visit the desktop from time to time, the lure of the iPad is profound. The lure of our kids having a better life, etc. Where’s my flying car? Right here, pal. And here and here and here. An app for that, and this, and hold on a minute, how do we manage this cornucopia of delights? Push notification is how. It works because the thing we had on our PCs called multitasking is just an illusion.

There is no such thing as time slicing, or if there is please send me the push notification as soon as possible. In reality we’re doing as many things as possible one thing at a time, so that with enough frames we get the illusion of smooth motion. The persistence of motion relies on our brains smoothing the granular iterations of changes into a smoothly blurred series of dissolves rather than the jump cuts they actually are.

So it is with push, where our brains dissolve smoothly between what we knew last and what we now know. Let’s say I’m reading Techmeme and I see that the biggest story today is something about Facebook and privacy. The newest story (right hand column) is something about the hot bubble market. It being Sunday, the weekend equivalent of fires and mudslides flesh out the rest. So I go to my Reading List and pick one of the stories I saw pushed to me during the week or some time I was too busy to stop what I was doing. Invariably something will eventually be pushed from email, Twitter, etc. that will rise above whatever I’m doing. A four finger swipe returns me when I’m done.

Lurking in just this short description are a number of strategies that emerge for coping with this new landscape. To illustrate just one, the Reading List in Safari becomes an important staging area, suggesting the need to iCloud-enable it so I can switch to and from the iPhone. Since the Reading List deletes the page from the list once you’ve retrieved it, you either need to swipe back to it and reregister it on the Reading List or finish it before closing that tab, or risk having it hidden behind a back arrow once you’ve used up Safari’s tabs.

Since pushes inevitably overflow the buffer of previous alerts, you learn to prioritize the processing of less time sensitive streams in bulk sessions. I’ll typically wait until the subject header of an incoming email alert doesn’t keep me in the loop, then open that one and read back in the email queue to catch up. Same for Twitter which keeps its own buffer of web page citation if I’m checker boarding back and forth with Safari. On the iPad, I can watch the push stream with the tablet asleep, then pick one item and go directly there via the security code requestor. Calls are immediately redialed.

Even these nascent tools suggest where this will go rapidly. Social filtering, presence mixed with social authority, the ability to configure rule sets for what reaches you immediately and how others are staged for you in buffers on different surfaces. And as these filters are built out historically and across our social groups and cloud, the views into that data will be increasingly valuable to us both personally and in our business. This is the real Big Data, big in its social implications and concise in its personal context. How corporations can use this will be up to us, or put another way, licensed to those who we trust to use this data in our best interests.

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — proved unequal to the task of rendering the week’s non-news into insight. Whether it was @scobleizer and Sergey Brin circling the famous Google Glasses or @dannysullivan grading Larry Page’s book report, nothing was revealed. No monkeys were harmed in the making of this film. They weren’t helped much either.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – Danny Sullivan, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Rob La Gesse, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — rode out of Dodge and straight into an ambush. Well, no, but in service of the OverAggregator Lord here are our talking points: Microsoft trembles at the alter of irrelevance, Google doesn’t get TV but may sneak into the tablet market by giving them away, and HTML5 still can’t get a date.

I snuck in the usual mentions of Mad Men and push notification, the first a reference to the return of the mesmerizing prequel to Seinfeld, and the second the technology that ensures that you don’t have to watch the stream all day to stay up with what’s going on. Combining delayed gratification theatre with premature notification will produce the next big hit of the iPad Age.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kr8tr, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Rob La Gesse, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

I thought I knew how the new iPad would be treated in the marketplace, but as usual I underestimated its impact. The numbers are impressive, but even more telling is the response from Microsoft. Here’s a company that knows how to sit on a lead, so they know just how bad a shape they’re in. But the best they seem to have come up with is a smattering of posts from old media that suggest the great gorilla is stirring.
 
You know the drill: now that iPad Three has shipped, the next big event is Windows 8 and its touch revamp. What? Developers are being told how to apply the iOS experience to the Windows tablet, emulating the move to tablets and off the desktop. It won’t slow down Apple, but it may hurt Android and set up a reasonable battle for second place. And speaking of Android, let’s offer free replacements of smartphones  with Windows Phone. Developers won’t invest in the platform until there is one in the marketplace.
 
Problem: how much time do I need a real keyboard? With iOS 5′s push notification view and four finger screen swipes between open apps, multitasking is no longer the panacea it was before apps took over. Yes, I can use a tablet replacement device to more efficiently navigate between cooperating services like Sharepoint, IM, and document creation, but what happens when the tweet or other social object is the master data record of truth? Suddenly we are not staging documents in a document store, but rather a prioritized stream of alerts.
 
In the Office days, documents were orbited by people. You used email and web pages to assemble the talking points, then pushed the draft out for peer review, then published. Today, you socialize the existence of the project, establish a working group, and sit back to let the collaboration form. Changes are inferred by comment, targeted with @mentions, and triaged by a meritocracy of ideas, political sophistication, and deadlines. There is no document, but rather an iterative group sense of the body of information, status of objective, and consensus formerly known as the editor.
 
If there is no document, how do you communicate to the outside world? There is no outside world. The knowledge transfer, the political moment, the engagement is continuous. To those who are inside the envelope, the experience is one of continuous total attention, as Linda Stone might now put it. This is the Twitter moment, when the world changes as we know it to what it has now become in real time. We no longer time shift from thing to thing, but rather absorb new data and overlay it with institutional memory.
 
We may not boil the ocean, but we do work hard to normalize the news to either reflect or change the consensus. Discordant objects are assigned higher authority, or refuse to be driven comfortably into the accepted. People who can continue to function while handling noisy annoying new facts become highly valued for their clear headed ness. They absorb the noise that people actually want a desktop replacement and process that data as confirmation that they want the exact opposite. They want the tablet. They want tablet software. They don’t want a tablet replacement.
 
Twitter remains valuable because its current leaders (and maybe the others too) realize they have a communications tool on their hands. To this day, we hear that what we want is a way to unfollow someone when they get too noisy, let’s say around an event, and then follow them again when they quiet down. But that is the old Office view of the world, where we are “interrupted” by information. In the push notification reality that’s seating itself now, those interruptions are signal of the savvy of the sender, the awareness of not each object but the signature of the entire stream.
 
The calculation has been nurtured since the earliest days of Twitter, when Track allowed us to monitor the intention of communicating in realtime without following. Suddenly you could see how people communicated their realtime intuitive profile, how they responded to what events, shared their need to communicate with who when. Luckily, Twitter’s mutual follow rewarded us with direct message tunnels to those who built our trust in them by respecting our sense of rhythm and willingness to collaborate. And that basic taxonomy of the Twitter follow cloud has remained stable and valuable ever since.
 
This is why iPad Three is selling out in that best possible sense, why Chatter feels so increasingly organic in its growth and value, why Office fades away. As long as Office was a target for being replaced, Microsoft had something to work with. The simple question would always be: how much do you use Excel? And, more importantly, does Outlook work on the iPad? And so on, tying the last generation of dominant software to the next generation of dominant services.
 
But the push notification platform doesn’t replace Office, it replaces Windows. And, more importantly, it replaces the desktop with the orchestration, the interplay, between services, some of which subsume Excel and Outlook with more collaborative surfaces. No more InBox is about to explode emails with Gmail, lots more analytics streams that answer the questions Excel is used to ask with realtime social data which reaches directly into the emotion of the economy.
 
Yesterday, faced with the loss of dear friends and the desire to not take anything for granted, I called an old friend I haven’t been in touch with for a while. He answered the phone just as the message began, but I could barely hear him through his hoarse rasp. But I told him I loved him, and missed him, and hoped to talk soon. Carefully, and as clearly as he could muster it, he said he hoped the same. 140 characters is plenty when that’s what we’ve got, and speed is everything.

The Gillmor Gang — Dan Farber, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — welcomed CBS News Online editor in chief Dan Farber back to the West Coast and the comfort of the Gang clubhouse. Dan was one of the Gang’s earliest members, gracing the IT Conversations podcast number 2 or 3 or so. Now, as the Web gets overrun by a sea of apps, as @scobleizer autofilters the firehose in realtime, as we go 15 minutes before we realize @jtaschek hasn’t moved a muscle (locked up), as the networks desperately stonewall live to iPad, the Gang feels like fun.

I’ve been saying Office is dead for years; it’s blindingly obvious. I like Word, using it to write this post. As we point out, collaboration is almost here as Redmond copies Google and the Sinofski fans in the chat room say social is coming in Office 15. But social is already here, and it’s going to be hard to sell the inevitability of cloud just when it’s already so obvious. I’ve kept the pro-Salesforce chatter (cough) at a low boil for as long as I can. See you on the funway.

@stevegillmor, @dbfarber, @stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor