So now we’re in for an apparently unlimited amount of blaming Facebook for just about anything that needs a scapegoat. Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine. I followed all the links on Bruce Francis’ Cloudblog story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers. But the net seems to be: don’t trust your friends when they have something to share with you.

I thought this was already well known, starting and ending with Digg and its tyranny of the crowd. Trending topics for me is another way of saying here’s what to find out enough about to ignore everything else until something new happens. All you need to know about this is to see how many unfilled programming jobs there are out there that involve dedupping.

I’m not looking for a social reader in any case. What we really need is a social limiter, a version of the Beatles’ favorite studio tool, the Fairchild limiter. I once sequestered myself for months at the Band’s ShangriLa studio in Malibu, where the producer who ran the place had assembled as many Fairchilds as he could get his hands on. These babies were like some velvet glove you could wrap around guitars, vocals, even drum tracks — and out would come this warm glowing sound bursting with overtones, that felt better than what went in.

Translate that into a stream that discarded the latest rehash of a trending article, the latest numbers why RIM is screwed, why Facebook is the worst IPO in history. How about a size-shrinker that offers some visible clues as to the amount of actual information in the few truly interesting headline grabbers. How about some metrics on what actually is the amount of information we’re looking for per inch. The Fairchild limiter didn’t limit the music; it expanded its impact and clarity.

Social reader is really a misnomer, though. What’s social is the path travelled to the push notification that triggers your awareness of the next thing to absorb. And I’m the reader, not some app on Facebook or anywhere for that matter. More and more, I’m the detective, intuiting what I don’t see in the space between the lines, the posts, the tweets. Now that House is over, we only have his mantra to employ: the relentless odyssey in sea rch of completely irrelevant revenge for some dimly perceived slight that suddenly explodes in insight based on a random piece of dialogue. Remember: everybody lies.

Take Facebook. Supposedly the IPO was rigged to protect the house, as in every other form of legalized and otherwise gambling. The interior logic of the show was that because Facebook has 900 million subscribers, they by definition are inevitably going to be profitable, maybe more so than their competitors present and future. I actually feel that’s kind of right, but have much less clarity as to how I personally can profit by the insight. For example, if everybody who invests $1000 can flip it ten minutes later for $1100, at what point do you run out of suckers?

But just because the stock dove, then recovered, then dove, then barely got back to square one, doesn’t mean we don’t still have that same intuition. Waiting until Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday and Thursday’s half bump, and Friday’s mini-dive, does nothing to change our minds about the big picture. 900 million, it’s like Sam’s Club, isn’t it? Who’s gonna do better anytime soon? So we didn’t do the flipitydip… it’ll just take longer. Meanwhile, the patient, this means us, is in a coma.

OK, let’s blame Scoble then. Doc Searls does a wonderful job of that in his new Techmemed post, but he somehow misses the point that Robert represents a fairly good bellweather of what actually is going to happen, namely that Facebook will succeed at whatever the hell it is experimenting with right now. Maybe the last minute warnings about mobile cluelessness are true, but I doubt it. My wife’s iPhone is off the hook with Facebook alerts from family, friends, and such. It’s not mobile they don’t get, it’s push.

That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue.

This is why micro-communities like Path and FourSquare persist. Their signal to noise is scoped by the care with which we follow our peers and the precision of the resulting clarity of pushes. In a world of push, the most valuable signals are the ones that don’t interrupt, don’t repeat, don’t strangle the message in a sea of marketing. Push is about permission, which turns advertising into information on request and marketing into paid subscription.

Push requires a PLA, or Push Level Agreement, where we populate our social channels with enough signal from which to derive educated guesses about our intentions and intuitions. Yes, Facebook has plenty of data, but little understanding of how to leverage it because we’re not allowed to tune the inference algorithms. Metadata farming requires not just permission but incentives for broadcasting rich metadata and priority context.

This is why Google + Circles are so brain dead. Yes, they let you know who you are broadcasting to. But no, they don’t let us know who you’re broadcasting to. I can’t intuit the effect a post has on the implicit group, so I can’t tell how important it is to know about in the push queue. Since you’re not telling me how important you think this is, why should anybody else weight it? There’s little incentive to create those signals, and the end result of a push notification of a Google + item is to perceive it as an interruption.

Push is the cloud’s security blanket. It implicitly says, those who trust you will be trusted by you. Everybody else loses. Push capital punishment is to go to the Settings page and turn off an app. SocialCam may be the first if they don’t watch out. I like the early days feeling of the app, but I’m not sure the trust signals coming from its users are visible enough for me to understand. Photo apps are only push friendly to the extent that they don’t go viral, which seems contradictory unless you believe that push is the new money. I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — pretended to care about Hipswitch, er HighLight while unwrapping Christmas in March’s iPad Next. After a somber opening in remembrance of @kevinmarks’ father John Marks and Firesign Theatre co-founder Peter Bergman, the Gang got down to brass pixels, the new breed of designer stalker software, and just what Tim Cook has up his sleeve for Christmas in December.

I’m still not convinced of the value of having alarms go off when @scobleizer is within 100 yards of 5,000 of his closest friends, but his argument about Twitter in the early days rings true. What’s a sure thing is how fast we’ll use up iPad 4G’s bandwidth allotment each month. Unlike Facetime, Skype can use all the LTE it can eat, and as a personal hotspot to boot on the Verizon version. WIth hotel WiFi costing 10-15 bucks per device, $80 bucks a month for 10 gigs starts to look like a businessman’s special.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — turned what @dannysullivan called a minor upgrade into a major landmark event. Not that Danny agreed with him, but @scobleizer thinks the new iPad will soon make flying an exercise in screen jealousy as millions upgrade when they land. @jtaschek was too busy signing me up for a new one to disagree. I call it iPad as a Service.

The new iPad comes with two peripherals — a new cover and Apple TV 1080P. Hard to tell what else has changed in the hardware, but the stealth news is that Netflix is now an Apple partner. That means the realignment around AirPlay as the hub of the Apple information bus is now in full swing. From Garageband to iPhoto to iMovie, the new wave of iOS apps will now be back ported to the Mac, not the other way around.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @dannysullivan, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Doc Searls, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — go through an entire show (almost) without mentioning Apple’s big event next week. Instead, we discuss Netflix’ new 26 hour movie model, why news silos can be good for you, the relationship between the Republican primary process and the secret source of innovation, and Cluetrain vs. the carriers.

Doc’s theory that Verizon killed fiber to get into the mobile market certainly does raise some eyebrows, but @scobleizer is happy just sucking down data because he’s living in the future. Me — I’ve been living in 1919 and Downton Abbey, waiting for Mad Men to return. So it goes in the Land of Licensing, where the only thing we own is the electric bill.

@borthwick, @scobleizer, @dsearls, @jtaschek, @stevegillmor

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Gillmor Gang – John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Doc Searls, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded.

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — inaugurated a new title format where the topic replaces the date of the show release (it’s in the URL). Today’s topic: what it always is, Apple’s relentless march toward encircling Windows in a sea of HD-quality iOS devices. In the latest update to OS X, push notification, the Twitter social bus, and AirPlay come to the TV by way of the full complement of iOSish devices, now including the Mac.

With iPad 3 just weeks away, Apple has made it retinal clear that the company has no intention of allowing anybody to catch up to the economic juggernaut where premium products sell out at prices that can’t be undercut. The realtime global social network fuels demand for the iOS pervasive screen architecture (and coopetive partners such as Android and Amazon) to such a viral extent that the resulting momentum keeps competitors from realizing Apple’s supply chain economies of scale.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — took a leisurely stroll on a late winter Friday afternoon. The subjects: Path and the Address Book, SuperBowl dynamics, and 21st Century Fox, aka the new television/social media hybrid model.

It may seem like all stories are self-referential in this time of trending to zero barrier to entry, but as with many realtime transitions, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees until you get enough altitude. With 98 million simulsharing social media out of 119 million in realtime, the uber address book that’s being built will absorb all the big players including Facebook and Twitter.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @borthwick, @kevinmarks

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

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