Chatter will inevitably go right at the heart of Microsoft’s Sharepoint strategy, which has some serious legs now that the company has wired Visual Studio up to it on the development front and Silverlight on the display side. With Windows Mobile 2010 and Silverlight Mobile still officially unannounced, Chatter has an interesting opportunity for the next three months or so to slipstream alongside Nexus One and Android. This gives Benioff plenty of red meat on the marketing front, but behind the scenes the real target is Twitter.

Chatter was pitched as a Facebook clone, and the more Facebook tweaks their status model the more it begins to look like FriendFeed on steroids. By tagging me in his Erick status update, I received not only Marc’s message but the replies of others in an email thread which pointed me back to a FriendFeedy conversation thread. So far Twitter has resisted harnessing its reply_id capability for conversations, leaving the field wide open for third party clients to (so far) pick up the ball. Robert Scoble was promoting one FriendFeed killer the other day that might go there with a promised UI overhaul, but my bet is on Facebook morphing quicker.

So now we get Facebook and Facebook Connect operating as a stalking horse for establishing an identity map that Chatter can do a LinkedIn party on. For each civilian identity, Chatter offers an extended professional identity with tools to cross-index among enterprises and their internal taxonomies. It’s like taking Twitter lists and harnessing them across affinity groups inside and across companies, leaving Twitter and its clients to carving up the customer end of the transactions. But guess where the carrots lie for those customers? The MinorityReport location-aware enterprises that have realtime deals just waiting to be pitched to those who register for stream offers.

CRM is the logical clearing house for these relationships, as long as care is taken to establish trust and authenticity at the intersection of public and private networks. I’ve often felt Facebook makes too much of the difficulty of transitioning its cloud to the apparently more open Twitter stream. With Chatter, that responsibility shifts to the Facebook Connect channel and the credibility of businesses seeking to engage with the social marketplace.

We’ve already seen the impact of service industries such as food and live entertainment (Yelp, FourSquare, etc.) Next may well be the media companies, once the tools of the trade ship over the next few months. Chatter’s application updates are a huge opportunity for the record companies to stave off a further collapse; same goes for the products formerly known as magazines. Just because the mainstream media is glomming onto Twitter as a realtime DVR index doesn’t mean private streams can’t be nailed up and distributed interactively by newmedia publishers with much higher signal to noise and the yield that comes from mining authority.

Salesforce has consistently outperformed the expectations of its competitors, not so much by some magical formula as by understanding the principles of bootstrapping pioneered by an early group of engineers and standards politcos. Google’s success at decoupling Office from our private lives has now rendered the opportunity to remake the business relationships from the inside out. Chatter can instantiate customer relationships based on what gestures we send to signal streams of our willingness to sip and save.

Chatter is not without challenges; figuring out the intersection of Twitter and Facebook will not come easily. But if Benioff continues to do what he has been doing now for the ten years of the Web Services revolution — correctly marrying a strong sense of what technologies will stick and foster consumer acceptance with the opportunities to disrupt slow moving competitors from his past — he and his company will continue to prosper.

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Jerry Seinfeld’s role inside the HBO show hewed to Curb’s central premise: that the “actors” improvise rather than read scripted lines. The situations are prepared, but not the actual interplay. In so doing, the onus shifts from the writer to the performer. For Larry David, whose persona and comic style is to set up some premise and then toy with his victims the way our cats play with a mole in the bathtub, this produces an expected effect of comic competence but not brilliance.

Comic actors fare reasonably well in this laboratory, especially well when they are playing themselves as do the Seinfeld cast. Comic actors as they are, they find their attitude as “themselves” then riff off of their characters to inform the elements of their essence. Kramer once again rockets through Jerry’s door as if suspended in mid-air, while the others lock in as though ten minutes, not years, have passed. At this point, the experiment is already successful. Now the question: what to do with it?

Slowly the surprising answer emerges with Seinfeld himself, never the most convincing actor as much as the exacting Chief Technology Officer of Comedy. His performance, now as then, on the show within the show is acceptable, a kind of George Burns turn that sets the stage for the action that swirls around him. But then there’s the revelation, as Seinfeld the improviser in the “real” reunion scenes achieves this incredible smile-glint limber comic feel that transcends everything he’s done both on the show and in stand-up. His interrogation of Larry’s endless bullshit is miraculous in its relentless massaging of a revolutionary comic platform.

These scenes, and they emerge subtly over the course of the season’s episodes, are so inspired that they make the job of making the reunion show itself hold up almost trivial. Of course, everything from the sets to the cameos by Newman and the read-through and the sub-plots involving the Curb regulars, it’s all blended together perfectly. But rising above that is Seinfeld with this gleam in his eye as he realizes (in a documentary feature about the filming) that something has been invented that moves ahead rather than just honor the past.

It’s as though The Beatles reformed somehow and it worked, although a good case can be made that Abbey Road was just that. Watching Mick Jagger duet with Bono on a U2 song at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame concert is another example of this magic, as he transforms a blues balled into something that hangs timeless in midair. Avatar in 3D is yet another gathering of technology and creative force that reaches an unexpected grace in even the simplest moments. So many glimpses beyond the usual in any year are the mark of something fundamental going on.

Despite the noise of those who disparage social media while trying to milk it, the network keeps expanding as if in the aftermath of some Big Bang we are so close to we can’t perceive it directly. Is it really so difficult to recognize how completely realtime devices have altered how we live? The brilliance of Avatar is the underlying message that if we can model how advanced reality will look and feel, we are essentially creating it at that moment. The computing devices used to render those scenes are soon to be reduced to silicon and rendered on hardware directly, thereby making science fiction science fact.

But the thrill of technology in and of itself does not begin to speak to the power of the network. Realtime is just a word to represent the visceral charge we get by seeing the needle dance when we post and someone responds. There’s a joy in collaboration, the moment when something more basic and common to the players infuses the work with a sense of something bigger than ourselves. The nod of oh, you saw that too. The eyes going cold with anger or distant with resignation. The boundaries of friendship torn away to reveal a simple energy where even the tumult is less important than the struggle to retain whatever friendship is or has been.

The idea of the iSlate or whatever the Kindle has unleashed is a good one, perhaps a game-changer for the people who make stuff to read, watch, and listen to. For us as the entertained, it is probably an iterative point along the march to the location-aware router that matches the screen to the environment and the content to the affinity-based priorities of our filters. John Borthwick’s analysis/hunches about the economic factors on the Gillmor Gang is informed with experience, leverage, and an awareness of the ongoing conversation about these issues.

During the show, I usually don’t have time to monitor the chat room, leaving that to scan later. When Mike Arrington switched topics to Avatar, a few grumbles surfaced from those who think movies, politics, or anything but hardcore API talk is a mistake. The question of what the show is or is trying to accomplish has always been difficult to answer, but with the convergence of computer, phone, and tablet now underway, the answer has never been more interesting. Everybody is asking the same question: VCs, app developers, once-relevant leaders of the technology revolution, even Dave Winer. Is this show biz or no biz, it’s getting boiled down to.

Borthwick wears a number of these hats simultaneously, so it’s great fun to ask him the same old questions and see what happens. Is RSS dead? No, it’s just moved into the background. Does it have an economic model? No, Twitter doesn’t have an economic model. How do you establish the authority model that Bit.ly uses to rank relevance and quality output? You’ll need to watch the show or at least that part to get the nuances of his answers. But what comes through in realtime 3D is that some of us are very excited about what these surfaces are enabling. As we wind down to the last hours of this dreadful enthralling year, let’s give thanks to the men and women who struggle to humanize technology and have some fun doing it.

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2009 has been a challenging year, particularly on a human level. Personally, I’ve seen friendships turn to dust as the economic crisis grinds the once-carefree impulses of the realtime Web into marketing and posturing. As someone who writes columns and produces the Gillmor Gang, certainly we all are guilty of these crimes. What I saw as a declaration of the obvious (RSS is dead) continues to roil the conversation, but the damage to a longstanding friendship with Dave Winer seems substantial. Perhaps the friendship that founders on disagreement is not the loss it once might have been.

On the plus side, the massive success of social media and its drivers has rendered moot the criticism that these issues and personalities are not worthy of the enterprise or indeed any serious pursuit of one’s time. As a product of the Sixties, if anything the connection between industry and my passion for technology, the arts, and comedy has become so pervasive that I would be virtually unrecognizable to myself from that era. I have become my father, mother, cop, and judge even as I struggle to make the mortgage and ease my kids into the unknowable future. Tech feels to me like the sessions for some potentially great record, or the noodlings of some robotic drum machine.

I haven’t seen the Lizard movie yet, but from afar it seems more on the side of science fantasy than fiction. I’m sure I’m wrong, but for now I’ll preserve that standoffish pose I took with Twitter and Facebook and the Kindle — knowing full well I’d soon join the stumbling herd but glad to pass the time today pushing more familiar buttons. As the stream floats by, the usual persists: open v. closed, tablet rumors, is realtime real, and so on. OK, I’ll bite:

If Apple really launches a tablet in late January, the growing wisdom is that such a device will roll up Kindle, AppleTV, and iTunes into an on-demand realtime streaming service/platform. Given the machinations of book publishers seeking to break the back of Amazon’s lock on the book stream, coupled with Comcast’s bundling of Web-on-demand with its triple play services, it seems logical that Apple would try and jump in before its competitors become too powerful. As with the mobile space, a tablet would need price supports to take off and hold ground.

The social platforms hold valuable cards (identity, affinity clouds, content gateways) but face commoditization and the threat of fragmentation of the realtime market by threatened incumbents (Murdoch, Microsoft, Google.) Since it’s more difficult to predict success, how about anticipating failure. The list of question marks has grown in 2009, including Nokia, Palm, the record companies, just about everybody too boring to talk about. When Scoble says talking about something is dead means it’s not interesting anymore, he’s wrong about what is being said but right about what interesting means. Namely, interesting as in can this help us survive or medicate us while the clueful move in to take over.

Looked at through this lense, what does Google Wave portend? Is it a rewrite of Gmail/Gchat with extensions into Google Office? Or is it a connecting technology to Android devices and tablets that forms the basis of a hybrid realtime OS with all of the opportunities of impulse transactions? If so, how do the media frames of the recent past fit into that fabric? Movies seem the least efficient just in terms of time cost and lack of repeatability relative to music and realtime news. Books would seem imperiled for similar reasons, but don’t underestimate the grounding aspect of relatively stable pools of information, nor the tendency of periodicals to blend into new forms that are more booklike in effect while preserving the dynamics of social filtering.

This sense of calm underlying the maelstrom that is realtime media is at the heart of what Wave represents, whether it gets there first or iteratively. Once people become addicted to the stream, the economics trend toward systems that allow parachuting in and out without breaking concentration or the appearance of it for the benefit of spouses, bosses, and cops at traffic intersections. Last night a friend told us about getting a ticket for failing to be aware of what was happening in front of him during a turn he was making. How dare the cop think he could get inside our minds and know what we’re thinking or indeed not thinking? The judge told him to shut up and pay the fine.

Will ChromeOS have more of an impact than Nexus One this coming year? I doubt it, not because Chrome won’t gobble mind share in significant if not voluminous quarters, but because Nexus One is so important as a driver of impulse economics. No matter how quickly we see realtime impacting on the economy now, once the Kindle psychology moves into the mainstream Web experience the momentum in terms of dynamic pricing will make search seem like slow motion. The implications of FourSquare are much more about the dynamic provisioning of offers as we (micro-communities) move through time and space than who’s Mayor and who’s in the room.

On the Gillmor Gang we wandered into a discussion (well, the chat seemed more like a meetup at the Place de la Concorde) about personalized aggregation. While some suggested the ReTweet cloud would get there first, I tend to side with the application of gestures to editorial views as I’ve assumed TechMeme has done since Day One. The nature and speed of those gestures may have accelerated, but the power of overlapping clouds of micro-communities has yet to be seriously challenged. That doesn’t mean we’ve actually seen this strategy built out at any consequential level, but Nexus One and whatever Apple is launching will produce a data wave of such economic force as to make Black Friday seem like a steam engine.

Inevitably, the conversation rotates back to the white hat/black hat discussion of the Open Web, with its hardcoded simplification of a much more interesting (Robert) circumstance. Luckily, those back-and-forth “no, you are” debates run out of steam and atrophy, while innovation, humor, and the music of the times draw people together in a feeling of micro-community that not only feels better but is producing a tidal wave of economic equity for its users. The Kindle effect is hidden in its avoidance of the backlight, marrying the calm of reflection with the speed of insight. It will indeed be interesting to see how this builds out. 2010 is already well underway.

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Only one small problem: Twitter killed RSS, not the other way around. Twitter didn’t do RSS some big favor by extracting the vast majority of citations away from Google Reader and its victims in the RSS aggregator wars. Twitter rolled through downtown URLville and right over every social media platform including Facebook with one simple premise. Hi, how you doin’? You are what you tweet. The next big thing since Gmail. Please put down your lunchbox and take a number.

Today URLs flow through Twitter. Ideas ship on Twitter. Software is built on Twitter. Fine: the Open RSS API means we can now write to a standard interface that lets Twitter clients become carriers for blogs, conversations, comments, podcasts, and all sorts of unaffiliated competitors. Except that’s hogwash. The time for bearhugging Twitter to the ground vanished when Facebook realized it had to clone Twitter or lose control of the social graph. Once FriendFeed created a realtime conversational data type, the race was under way to codify Twitter and extend it before Twitter absorbed the capability. Neither has happened yet, but once either company reaches that goal, there is no need for a social revolution.

This is not the IM Wars all over again. This is not Do No Evil 2.0. Twitter has produced a great service that transcends the politics of the moment, just as Gmail eviscerated email as we knew it. What part of Yum, Good do we fail to understand is bad for us? It’s a simple and inviolate contract: you do something useful and I’ll give you my data. How do they make money with that? Don’t care, they’ll think of something. If everybody likes it, you got yourself a lock on the market.

This is why the Gphone materializing is just as good for Apple as Google, and therefore all of us. Competition drives innovation, and it also drives duopolies, as Jason correctly noted on this week’s Gillmor Gang. Twitter has already created a duopoly, by proffering a public model with exceptional filtering characteristics that neatly validates Facebook’s private identity model. The power is not in a single API unification but rather an economic duopoly at the intersection of the two social platforms.

Why is the Gphone powerful? Because it leverages price supports to drive the cost of the device toward zero for the user. Google can afford to lower the smartphone entry point to match the iPhone, and in so doing set up a competitive environment where social applications can flourish equally well across both platforms. Those broadband social applications (using hybrid development tools across ChromeOS and Silverlight) provide a second wave of price supports in the form of marketing and transactional revenue. 1% of everything that moves is plenty of a business model for Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and the rest of the global economy to boot.

This doesn’t mean that there’s no room for the little guy, the small developer, the open source aesthetic, the impulse to contribute to the community. It just means that painting these companies as evil or controlling or untrustworthy begins to say more about the motives of those who attack them. Of course Twitter can be disingenuous when they remove services for “technical” reasons only to sell them off to Microsoft and Google for millions of dollars when they rebuild their infrastructure. But did that slow down adoption of the service or the proliferation of third party apps? Is Facebook slowing down as it tramples privacy?

No and no. Twitter continues to build out its dominant social array of overlapping follow clouds. Lists and firewalled retweets may keep Scoble and others busy, but until realtime conversation is enabled, Twitter will be valuable mostly for its ubiquity and trigger mechanism for dynamic filtering. Facebook is testing Twitter posting, which when implemented will become the laboratory for FriendFeed style aggregation and realtime chat. Put simply, Facebook will become the hybrid of both models, forcing Twitter to enable threading to contain the damage to its authority model.

We’re seeing a realtime negotiation between these two leaders of the social revolution, with Benioff, Ozzie, Jobs, and LarrynSergey waiting patiently just off camera. It’s a good time for the Open Twitter API guys to declare victory, but it would be nice if they stopped sliming the socialcos and bigcos who get it just as much.

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Demand billing and recurring subscription management company, Aria, offers a solution built to manage PCI compliance for companies. Instead of companies investing in the necessary infrastructure to meet the compliance standards themselves–which includes employee background checks, installation of security cameras on-premise, and third party audits of your network–they can have Aria handle the entire online transactions process, from start to finish, taking advantage of their level 1 (the highest and most rigorous) compliance level, thus mitigating costs which would be incurred had a company tried to become compliant.

By taking advantage of Aria’s suite of payment processors, which include the likes of Authorize.net, Chase Paymentech, Cybersource, PayPal, TransFirst, and RBS Worldpay, customers are able to shop around and find a solution which suits their needs. This versatility adds an extra layer of security and functionality. Conversely, if a company wishes to make themselves PCI compliant, they can only use one payment processor, severely limiting their options.

Aria promises to have their solutions “deployed in 30 days or less for $30,000,” but founder and CEO Ed Sullivan says that many times they are able to deliver compliance even sooner. The services offered by Aria are intended for businesses involved in card-not-present transactions and their customer base includes those who are in the cloud, staff, telecommunications, media, and online gaming sectors.

Aria is based in Philadelphia and has a sales and marketing office in San Mateo. A complete list of the payment processors which Aria is affiliated with can be found here.

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In any case, I won’t reveal what was said by Googlers because I want to be invited back next year. Also because they didn’t say anything that contradicts anything they’ve said publicly or that I’ve made up out of whole cloth. In fact, what I can talk about is what I said. Here’s a digest of that stream:

It seems that the WebOS contest for the hearts and minds for developers is settling out as one between ChromeOS and Silverlight. In my mind, ChromeOS is Chrome, and now that it’s on the Mac I care. Chrome therefore subsumes FireFox, Safari, and eventually Android, regardless of what has been said about the difficulty (or not) of having one OS span the desktop and mobile devices. I can’t tell you when Googlers will release Chrome Extensions but a spokesperson pointed out Google has publicly stated the project is open source, which suggests you could look up the answer to this and many questions. Indeed MG has made a career out of doing this.

So when Extensions ship, I will move off of Firefox within minutes, not because I have any extensions other than PowerTwitter but because I wait for enough stability and market force to make moving a conservative bet. And the main thing I’m waiting for above all else is Silverlight compatibility. I can’t say what Googlers said about this, but my thought is that if they can support the crap Adobe AIR hairball, they can support Silverlight. My bet is they will or already do.

I can’t say what Googlers said about HTML 5, but I said it would take 2 or 3 years before it got close to production, that in the meantime Apple and YouTube were forcing a standard around H.264, that Moonlight decompiling strategies coupled with the Silverlight to iPhone bridge demoed (almost) at PDC will provide a sufficient porting path to normalize the difference between iPhone and Android development, and that whatever the (n)on-existent Google phone looks like, it will produce a 2-horse market within a year. I can’t say how Googlers responded to my theory, but if someone were to use this as an argument for the iPhone being in trouble they’d be wrong.

That’s because (as I told the Googlers) nothing about Android or the nPhone mandates that Apple will stand still. Indeed, a strong Google phone or tablet or both frees Apple to ride right through the hole created by competition and drive the carriers further into a reactive postion. You can already see this happening as Apple approves Ustream, Qik, and even downstream video recording apps in swift succession. Once Verizon is filleted by either Google or Apple or both later this new year, it’s a battle for infrastructure to support the new Kindleized mobile marketplace, with the dueling AppStores providing DisneyBucks (Admobs or something like it) as payola for chart position. I kid the old record companies because they’re dead.

Speaking of the Kindle, it’s instructive to note how the book companies are trying the same stall that ultimately killed the record cartel, slowing down the release of some e-titles until they’ve milked the airport crowd. Meanwhile, Comcast is within minutes if not already releasing its on-demand access to premium content, and Netflix over Silverlight is spurring MacMini sales hooked up to sub-$700 1080 HD screens. We’re in mop up mode here, and the less-is-more design model of matching the quality of content with delivery mechanism is tipping the marketplace from downloading to streaming and built-in to bluetooth. As I told the Googlers, the marketplace won’t wait for HTML5, so HTML5 will have to come to them. I can’t say …

As the evening wound down, I talked with several Googlers about data portability and the Google stranglehold in search. I can’t say what they said, but I said I’m not worried about storing all my data in Gmail because it’s a lot safer than on my hardrive or not backed up as it always turns out to be. As to the Facebook issues regarding privacy and the difficulty of protecting digital breadcrumbs from winding up in someone’s unintended stuffing, I doubt the ability to constrain the leaking of private data and instead suggested Google would eventually be held responsible for surfacing inappropriate data at the top of its searches. In fact, what I am looking for are self-service tools that let me submit requests for redacting search results around the publishing of private data.

I can’t say what the Googlers think, but my bet is that this counter filtering will produce a new responsibility for data vendors, placing the onus on the search publishers to be responsible for what private data is made widely available when the appropriate IP owners (parents and individuals) have registered a social DMCA notice. As I told the Googlers, users (us) don’t care where the data is actually stored, only how it is being published and to who. I also predicted this technology will become a valuable part of competitive search offerings.

Perhaps the Googlers will surface some of their opinions on these subjects in the coming days, but even if they remain to be mined from open source archives the general thrust of the conversation is moving forward inevitably, beyond closed v. open and toward a pragmatic mix of both worlds. That’s why Silverlight is so viral in its evolution, moving in the past few months from a radical challenge to a conservative fundamental. Just as with ChromeOS, we still hear caveats and shadings about the disruptive qualities of these WebOS strategies, but simultaneously the boundaries between these two seemingly different paradigms are blurring to the point of disappearing.

The social layer is now the unifying driver of both platforms, and those industries, whether enterprise, media, or mobile, are being pushed into a single fabric. The realtime feedback loop retrieves gestures of interest and lack of it to the filtering server where it is compared to others with similar affinities and discounts applied based on the likelihood of accepting those offers. This builds on the Google Adsense model and its economies of scale around advertiser volume, but the social graph produces rich hubs of affinity which produce greater return. Swarm ranking trumps broader audiences when the tools to harvest more implicit affinities are available directly to the producers of the new products made viable.

But that’s just what I said. The other side of the conversation was at least as interesting. For now, this will have to be like one of Bob Newhart’s famous phone monologues, where you only hear Bob’s side of the call. Like the famous 8 foot invisible rabbit Harvey, after awhile you start to see and hear him just fine, thank you.

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