The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.

@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — debut the latest Google catchphrase to replace Do No Evil: We Really Don’t Care!

@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Dennis Crowley, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — visit with the ghosts of Foursquare Past, Present, and Future. @dens is semi-bicoastal these days, trying to stay ahead of his growing business. He just moved in to a new office in NY, and the one in SF is expanding as rapidly as he can hire.

We try to get him to say bad things about Google +, but he demurs. But he never escapes the Gang without leaving a bit more of his roadmap than he anticipates. Of course, you’ll need gamification chops to uncover it.

@stevegillmor, @dens, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — on SOPA, Google +, and the End of Software Mayan 2012 Edition. Not one of my best efforts, but the Gang more than picked up the slack.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — kicked off the New Year in CES style. That’s CES as in Apple-Free, last Microsoft keynote, All TV all the time, Super Cab Lines Vegas stays in Vegas. Both @dannysullivan and @scobleizer spent a great deal of time handicapping the race for control of what used to be called the TV set.

These days I’m not so sure, as Apple’s AirPlay could just as easily come in a controller-sized package (read iPhone) as a 100-inch box. The real battle is over how to find something decent to watch, and the big question is whether Google will figure out how to get network shows onto its service or if Amazon will embrace and extend Apple TV.

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

Produced and directed by Tina CHase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — wound up the Old Year and previewed the next one. In fact, we are already well into Social Spring, what with SOPA, Go Daddy, the media scramble, Louis C.K. and the $5 download, Spotify and the independents, Apple AlmostTV, Microsoft irrelevancy, and the end of email.

We’ve had fun, and while we’re at it, please consider helping my daughter’s Creative Arts Charter School in San Francisco recover from a five-alarm fire. Thanks to everyone who showed up this year, and especially those who didn’t.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang goes enterprise in a conversation with Paul Greenberg, the eminence grise of the CRM, now Social CRM world. Gangsters John Taschek and Steve Gillmor decrypt Paul’s latest report from the front. Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor. Recorded live Wednesday, December 28, 2011.

@stevegillmor, @jtaschek, @pgreenbe

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a WiFi stroll through the forest that is Hollywood’s attempt to lock down our TVs. And by stroll, this one features @stevegillmor at a leisurely somewhat brain-cell challenged pace. You can almost see him think, except that there’s not much thought going on there. No, really. The others are in good condition, unless you count @scobleizer once he starts hitting the whiskey toward the end.

As to the battle for control of our TV, it’s really too late, what with SOPA boycotts, reverse engineering of the Apple AirPlay bus, and Microsoft’s slow fade from CES underway. But that doesn’t stop the Cartel from trying. It may turn out that you can someday move network news shows from Slingbox to iPad and back up to Apple TV over WiFi; for now the realtime bus is getting choked. In fact all things streaming are about to collide with bandwidth caps, at least in our house. With 4 Apple TVs and counting, it won’t be long before WiFi consulting becomes a trade school offering. Me, I’m off to Fry’s to follow the chat room advice. Happy Holidays.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Somehow we keep thinking email will survive the social wave. It is the ultimate social tool, we reason. It’s an open standard, whatever that really means. It’s ubiquitous, you know, like Flash. Makes my head hurt to think about it going away. Nope, email is bigger than the Beatles.

Yet the signs are everywhere. George Colony sees social running out of time per day and people, but something will give. Email or phone? Email. People use social to determine whether you will answer the phone. People use email to communicate in the absence of more social metadata. It comes down to this: will social absorb email or the other way around?

I spend roughly 75% of my computing time on the iPad/iPhone. The covert Blackberry under the desk in meetings has been replaced by the glance at push notifications as they light up the iPad or scroll in from the top if I’m reading or browsing. Email is still there, a strong tie or second by a nose in attention and even overt interruption. But what email doesn’t have more than outweighs its position in my time hierarchy.

Email is about a defined relationship, or a management tool for broadcast information. Newsletters and media pings take up the majority of the Gmail flow, where I aggregate everything except Salesforce corporate email and calendar. Both are meshed into iOS mail, with the Exchange mail configured to generate push notifications on delivery and Gmail batched thereafter. In aggregate I’m more or less at the mercy of the agenda of the external, the unanticipated, the insistent, the invite, the reminder.

At some point, the need to further reprioritize this stream overwhelms the reluctance to write a filter or more usefully add a label. But “doing my email” becomes an exercise in deflection rather than sensing the flow of the external as compared to my internal sense of what’s going on. CCs add some level of group awareness along with a dose of political jousting, but mostly the signal is either noisy or extremely tactical.

Strategically, social has many more attributes that heighten the value of individual objects. These include comments, Likes, retweets, @mentions, and direct messages. Given their integration of citation and identity, these signals move beyond CCs and BCCs to build a sense of social traction that carries with it a history and context for new messages. Given two movies to choose from, I’ll go with the one that best rolls up the opinions of those I respect, and often, don’t respect. Those “that’s the last time I listen to you”s are among the most valuable to harvest, and are only useful because people keep tweeting.

There’s a social history in email, but it’s based on a structure of authority, presumed or otherwise. It’s an FYI not FOI as in Our. @mentions are a blend of both, alerting both the mentioned and those interested or following. Direct messages are the most email-like, but even there they provide shared social history as a back channel commentary on group business. And groups go beyond email in avoiding forking and pruning without a consensus.

As tools such as Flipboard blur the distinction between the social channels, they make it harder and harder to carve out time for a personal channel opaque to search engines and realtime advertising. Streaming services disintermediate email by establishing a social relationship that avoids physical purchases in favor of app-triggered notifications. Businesses can now compare the accumulated value of social versus email, and are investing in the former not just in technology but people. Robert Scoble is better known by his Twitter handle than his email address.

Today email serves as a notification service for social. I get social notifications both via push on mobile and email as an archive. The more efficient push gets, the more email becomes a redundant service. On iOS devices, I am now using push alerts to get to email more frequently than opening the mail client itself. I see the alerts flow through on the tablet or phone without having to log in, and use my security code only on items I have particular interest in. Swiping a missed phone call notification saves even more time, automatically calling the number back. These more efficient, actionable gestures are the new normal.

Our kids already understand that email is fading. They model the world on Facebook, tracking invites in their message stream or as event invites. At a glance they see who’s coming, who’s not, and why not. A calendar invite carries none of that context unless you go to a web page, which for those too young to remember is an early form of social media. Foursquare tells you you’re late or on time based on who you know showing up or not. GPS is people.

Our kids have the advantage of not having to deconstruct email and calendar. They don’t have to move their friends into the new paradigm; they’re already there with them. They don’t have to create authority, influence, and attention; they already have a rich shared history. We, however, have some work ahead of us. We need to identify and convert a rich subset of people from using email with us to sharing a social space with us.

@mentions are the most valuable tool we have for this task. You can establish the desire for a connection with a series of such references, not just to a single target but to a group you identify and alert communally. Many of these @mentions already have bidirectional follows, making direct messages possible. New tools such as Chatter with its external group technology let you expand direct messages into secure conversations. Email takes more clicks, lacks social metadata, and has no stable collaborative history.

I have no dog in the hunt for whether social will prevail or email will survive. Radio still survives in the Age of Video, and Web will not be crushed by App. But once we get absorbed person by person into social, one channel at a time, there’s no percentage in going back. Once I figure out the simplest path across the stream, social signals begin to popularize that method. Perhaps it will gain momentum, or be absorbed by something slightly better. Email will remain as an important early step, like SIP as the first stage of setting up a call. Once the channel is established, no need to go back to email. Once you get redirected from Web to App, the next time you go direct into the app.

Change is ratified by the difficulty in rolling back. What was once hard to imagine let alone accept can become so obvious as to be ignored. In a world dominated by mobile, the invisible triumphs in the cloud, is passed along as entertainment, and then ratified by economy of scale in time saved. The reason email will disappear is because it is the single most effective tool for moving to social.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — celebrate the freeing of Heather Harde, the health of realtime, the obsolescence of Office, and the gamification of deep enterprise apps. It never ceases to amaze how some people rescue defeat from the jaws of victory, but Techcrunch’s loss of its business leader is our gain.

As @scobleizer shows on his undulating realtime screens, Techcrunch past present and future continues to be at the bleeding edge of the social wave. Just as Microsoft continues to box itself into an innovation-free corner and give disruptive energy room to thrive, so too does AOL watch value flow from editorial through the technologies it uncrunched and onto the social mobile platform. As the crowd of another era shouted, the whole world is watching. The revolution will be streamed.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Laura Fitton, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — questioned the sanity of several industry players in a lively @scobleizer-shortened appearance. Robert had just enough time to reiterate his distaste for the new Twitter UI and Eric Schmidt’s predictions of Android and Google TV success.

But it was George Colony’s LeWeb prognostications on the state of the Web, Social, and Enterprise that got the juices flowing at the dawn of the new week. Laura, or @pistachio as she favors, sees most of Colony’s pitch as Theatre of the Obvious, while @jtaschek and @kevinmarks sneered at the idea that the Web was going anywhere any time soon. @stevegillmor thought what he usually thinks, and enjoyed it.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Borthwick, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — gears up for a rough and tumble Social Shakedown. Facebook, Path (?), Gmail filters, News.me, Media Redefined — we’re swimming in signal without a paddle. But some of us (@scobleizer) are happy to see the big get personal and the little get better.

Whether you live to serve the social beast, or prefer to stand back and see how big this is going to get, it really doesn’t matter whether this is early innings as @jtaschek and @borthwick suggest or reaching an @mention moment as @stevegillmor expects. The culture of business and the politics of the personal have swapped personalities, and work and play are meeting up in the middle.

@stevegillmor, @borthwick, @scoblizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor. recorded live Friday, December 2, 2011.

The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, John Borthwick, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live today at 1pm PT.

Recording is over.

With all these amazing tools we have, it’s not a little surprising how much we take the traditional forms of media as the way things are and should be done. The iPad exposes the mediocrity of our expectations, with its Reader button in the address field stripping the comments and jingle jangle out and letting us focus on the simple post as form. Get in, state the premise, survive the middle, get out.

I remember the days of Hunter S. Thompson, the free range lunatic who stepped up where Kurt Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe had not feared to tread. It was always a mystery he uncorked, starting with the possibility that he wouldn’t even file a story at all. The rhythm was in the gasps between paragraphs, those stolen breaths taken that functioned as cymbals compressed in high hat swirls.

How grateful we were for the next issue of Rolling Stone, with the crazy drawings, the ridiculous dashes on the open road, the fearless unmasking of the hypocrisy of the time. Exhilarating doesn’t even come close to the feeling he commandeered in a string of features that defined the turbulence of the times as something funnier, darker, elastic, and even perhaps ultimately pointless. Even that last was part of the rush.

I don’t pretend to understand how he got there or how brave and foolish he was to try. The shimmer of that arc has never been something you could package or survive, it seems. But what is sure is that we live surrounded and enveloped in the existence of those gasps of fresh air, and that it is a choice we make to ignore them.

Thinking ahead to what I look forward to, I remind myself that even in the language of the times, the poetry of the words always meant more than the ideals. Freedom was a rallying cry, but the actual cry took freedom for granted and went further. Freedom to do what? It wasn’t about the right to do something, it was about what the something was to do. Escaping gravity to do what?

There’s a moment in East-West, the seminal Paul Butterfield Blues Band record, where an early crescendo releases into a stunning guitar exploration by Mike Bloomfield. It’s like you’re suddenly propelled floating into space, on a journey you thought you might be in for but had no way of being sure of. And as it again builds into a frenzy and pulls that same trigger yet again, you realize how this place exists right there in front of you, waiting for that moment to reappear ever so slightly different.

The next song, can you believe there even is a next song? “I got a mind to give up living/ Yes and go shopping instead.” The blues with a steely glint of comedy, you say? What kind of alchemy is possible that springs from the celebration of loss, destruction, death — and that’s just before the opening credits. And remember: it’s sitting right there next to you with that insane grin on its face.

Something about the juxtaposition of things reminds me of the politics of disruption, the emotional spring of the social generation. By themselves, interesting, intellectual perhaps, but not of the parallel land of hope and acceptance. I read an interview with Noel Gallagher, the supposedly sane one of the Oasis brothers. Something about Oasis being in the Top 10 of bands. He ducked the statement briefly, attributing it to alcohol and passing it off as Top 20 straight.

But then he owned it anyway and listed the groups: “(T)he Beatles, the Sex Pistols, the Rolling Stones, the Who. I can never remember 5. Maybe the Kinks. I can’t remember 6, then Oasis.” Well, allright. It’s a stretch for me, but I can’t remember 5 or 6 either. The strange part is, I can see where the guy is coming from. And it doesn’t matter whether he’s right or not, just that he sees something just over there.

I don’t care how noisy the stream is. The more the better, actually. Until it gets so useless someone comes along and hops alongside it and surfs it, like a wave building as it nears the shore. It’s not that there’s necessarily some huge revelation just around the next tweet. It’s that there are wonderful souls and achingly precious children and silly love songs and the best breakfast place around and a roar of ideas and jockeying for position and routine power grabs and whatnot.

So here are my Top Ten predictions. the iPad, push notification, Chatter external groups, the Cloud, AirPlay Mirroring, Spotify, @mentions, and I can’t remember 5 or 6 either. Gillmor Gang is 7.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — talked SOPA, Amazon Fire, FaceBook Borging our data and not letting it out, the end of books, the beginning of Pad magazines, and why Spotify, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Starz, Arrested Development, House of Cards, and Comcast cares.

Another Gillmor Gang recorded Monday morning at 9, the show asks the musical question: should we start the week off with a bang or end it with a whimper? In the new world of streaming, nothing is more fitting than messing with the broadcast window from the start. If Congress can only pass bad laws to prop up the content cartel, maybe it’s up to the tech community to turn reality TV into our fantasy of what should happen next.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Monday, November 21, 2011.
@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @kevinmarks

The Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor – are recording live today at 9am PT.

Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took advantage of the early rays of the new rising sun to record. It must have been fun to watch the caffeine kick in, but the show was half over before I arrived. I’d been up late mourning the death of Flash, which finally received an auto-update from reality it couldn’t refuse.

Next for a wake-up call is Google+, which @scobleizer ripped a new one while continuing to insist it was just a matter of some filtering and expanded fan pages. Meanwhile it’s time to play with Amazon Fire, which the rest of the Gang has on order, and salesforce.com’s new Do.com service, for which I’ve obtained an invite code good for 500 uses. This show is rated G+.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor. Recorded live Monday, November 14, 2011.

The Gillmor Gang is recording live today at a special day and time. Monday 9am Pacific Time. Guests: Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor.

Recording has concluded.

We hear a lot about gamification these days, which appears to be about providing incentives for us to contribute to social networks. The idea is that we need some additional rationale beyond the blogger’s call of being mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. This is also expressed as making a difference, or paying forward, or the myriad themes of a number of self help/business books.

Certainly a pinch of game mechanics can help, as FourSquare makes clear. Being mayor of the DMV may not make your day, but the more data FourSquare consumes, the more it has to come up with reslices of those signals to keep people engaged. That same feedback loop is what made Twitter what it is still becoming today — a living, breathing central nervous system for the mobility set aka most of us.

But as much as I hear the logic of game mechanics, there are other larger drivers of the social mobile wave. And nothing stands out more than what could be called the Appification of the computer, web, and media. You can trace this surge in reverse, starting with the predictions of the impact of iPhone/iPad’s failure to support Flash and continuing right up to today with the clock-ticking about Apple in the wake of its leader’s death.

At its simplest, the reason Flash is road kill is that Steve Jobs asked us which was more important — the coolest possible set of toys ever or a few months of consternation by the studios who had already milked as much as they could from a hemorrhaging DVD market. Even though it appeared a fair fight at the time, the reality was that the creative industries were at a low point in their history while the technology business was entering the most creative part of its cycle.

In interesting ways, this role reversal played to the power unleashed by the crescendo of realtime social technologies and the miniaturization wave triggered by the space program. The last big creative surge in movies and music was led by similar technology developments in production — small, hand held cameras and motion control devices that decoupled producers and directors from the studio system, and multitrack recording and digital sequencing that lowered the cost and brought record-making to the living room.

The ease with which blockbusters could be made and marketed also had the effect of encouraging sequels and mainstream bets, slowing the opportunity for growing new talent at the very moment the tools allowed a democratization of access to the industry. Technology became the byword of monetization, from 3D to HD and the scourge of reality gamification.

By contrast, the technology business turned creative as realtime and mobile proved an opening for Jobs and Page/Brin to do insanely great things with digital magic. Gmail proved the experts dead wrong when it offered unlimited storage, a Golden Goose that did something no one thought possible. The Cloud meant you could have your cake and eat it too; it was always true that you were defined by the data you threw off,, but now you could summon it with a magical cursor that rewound through search to the moment you recalled in your history.

The economies of scale Microsoft had achieved for itself and customers were suddenly turned on their head and delivered to the users as transformative tools. In effect, we were incentivized to create data and the traces of how we consumed such data as payment for the cloud services that resulted. This was the social contract that Twitter and Facebook parlayed into the leverage needed to first, make realtime work and second, attract the services needed to replace the atrophying media that preceded.

The iPad delivered the coup de grace — all media, games, communications, social emitter, and business disruptor — and in the process sidestepped the carriers the iPhone unhinged with the AT&T deal. Instead of a service contract, the media displayed on the device became the subsidy. The Kindle Fire is the companion instantiation of that strategy, with Amazon Prime morphing beyond free shipping to a Netflix/Spotify competitor. All very creative, while Hollywood contorts in the search for revenue replacement.

Let’s take on the notion that Apple is now reduced to playing out the clock post-Steve. As I type (iPad of course) push notification is in its middle school phase as @mentions stream in from the network next to email and news bulletins. Siri is shipping while still in Beta, a first for Apple by the way, but it’s stream-enabled to the point where it stops working when an outage occurs. The history of the cloud is benchmarked by such outages, as massive adoption pushes out the scalability and security model beyond the false cloud one it’s replacing.

In effect, Apple has done the one thing it must do to stand up to Google and the loss of Jobs: go to the Cloud. Take the Beta designation — all Google products were beta until Google Apps went after enterprise sales. With Google+ now reworking the front end of all of the products, it seems beta is back in business. For Apple, it means something different: “We’re looking for your help in creating the future.”

After all, it’s not like the iPad happened in a vacuum just last year or whatever. According to a PBS documentary on Steve Jobs, he sketched out the outlines of the device for at least one person some 30 years ago. Then there’s the way Jobs didn’t wait for the users to tell them what they wanted, but went ahead and created it for them. Well, that’s right. I didn’t want Siri for the longest time, and didn’t really even when I got the new 4S. But now my wife says I’m having an affair with the damn thing.

Here’s why. It’s because it’s Beta, not in spite of it. Because it’s hard wired to the network, I literally can’t wait to turn it on to see if it’s getting better. Same with the OS, which for the first time in iOS 5 is upgraded over the air. Take Pages, which uses the system spell correction. One of my favorite bête noires is how it handles “its”. In the previous generation it auto-corrects to “it’s” which means “it is” 100 percent of the time and which gets it wrong about 90% of the time. IOS 5 gets it wrong about 50% of the time. Beta wins 100% of the time.

The reason I think Appification wins is that other big deals like gamification and crowd sourcing and HTML 5 are rolled into the A Theme. Take push notification, please. It’s the most creative adjunct to the iPad ever, so far. As I type, the Gillmor Gang retweets roll in at the top, then a work-related email, then a time sensitive one on the management offsite next week in Vegas, and so on. I look at what I need to look at, and stage the ones I don’t want to interrupt my writing flow. When I’m ready to take a break, I already know where to go and swipe the history down from the top of the screen and go. It’s a creative tool, like the part of the movie where I rush to get the popcorn refill.

It’s not an App versus Web argument either. It’s about the creative edge where many of us like to recharge our batteries from office politics and family quibbles, that place where the frontier meets the ocean and we care more about the silence where good ideas sometimes go to be born. Don’t worry, without the Steve Jobs of the world to mix and match the right ingredients at the right time, we wouldn’t have the success that breeds the blockbusters and sequels and tips the balance away from Northern and back to Southern California.

Apps and the Web thrive off of each other. Touch + wrapper. When app gets the network it becomes the sum of all its parts, aware of its possibilities, able to provide the contours and context of what feels like a coherent entity. My mind feels comforted by the notion of the app, like hot chocolate after a day on the ski slope. Some place to go, beginning middle end. Yet I want the potential for disruption, the harnessing of those great minds out there signaling on the social stream, the drumbeat of serendipity orchestrated while I savor a good book. Discovery by design.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — returned to the Social Wars with renewed vigor courtesy of two weeks of material. These issues included the Klout algorithm crisis, more fun with iOS 5 push notifications, the incredible shrinking Google+ numbers, and @scobleizer’s fabulous Verb Wall aka Spotify Motel where data goes into Facebook and never comes out.

Personally, I’m not too worried about Facebook leaving money on the table, or how Netflix suddenly validated a ton of value with their supposed social mistake. Instead I see an ever-expanding set of social services creating new opportunities for sharing realtime hints about what we will find interesting and valuable just in time. Oh, and Twitter just keeps on rocking. Now back to my movie, @Mention Matinee with nobody you have heard of yet.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks