The Great Seduction

Digital Vertigo

2009-07-07T16:44:11-07:00

I’ve been extremely busy recently reorganising my commitments and schedules. This post is by way of an update on some of my key recent developments: a new book deal, new US and International speaker representation, and a new weekly newspaper column.

Steve Hanselman, my literary agent at Level 5 Media, has closed negotiations on the US rights to my forthcoming book with New-York based St. Martins Press. The new book, provisionally entitled DIGITAL VERTIGO: Loneliness, Anxiety and Inequality in the Social Media Age will be a contemplative defense of privacy rights and genuine human interaction in the social networking era. Michael Flamini, who has published many fine books including Kevin Sessums' New York Times bestselling Mississippi Sissy: A Memoir, and James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, will be my editor at St Martins.

Steve Hanselman is currently organising the publishing rights to Digital Vertigo outside of the US. Any Inquiries concerning international markets should be directed to him at stevehanselman@gmail.com

It makes sense to be represented within the US as a speaker by my publisher’s parent company, the Macmillan Publishing Group. I’m pleased to now be in the capable hands of Macmillan Speakers, who broker gigs for a number of their top authors. To book me to speak at a US event, please email Ellis Trevor, the manager of Macmillan Speakers, at Ellis.Trevor@macmillan.com.

Since many of my speaking engagements are outside the US, I'm also very pleased to have signed with the prestigious London Speakers Bureau, the most international agency in the world, who will manage my non-US, international engagements. To enquire about speaking bookings anywhere in Europe, Asia, Latin America or Africa, please contact LSB director Tom Kenyon-Slaney at Tom@londonspeakerbureau.co.uk.

The London Daily Telegraph is the most widely circulated serious British newspaper, with a very impressive reader numbers both in the UK and around the world. I've been signed by the Telegraph to write both a new weekly column and semi-daily blog posts. My first Telegraph column, Blood on The Streets, about Twitter and Iran, appeared a couple of weeks ago, and my blog just launched this week on the Daily Telegraph website with a short review of the iPhone 3GS. Please do head over there and enjoy both the posts and the extensive comments they're attracting.

Having committed myself to writing about technology, media and culture for the Daily Telegraph, this blog will revert to becoming my personal diary. Please stay tuned. It won't be as boring as it sounds.

Is innovation fair?

2009-06-06T03:28:31-07:00

Is innovation fair? Has the Internet revolution resulted in more social justice and equality for everyone in society?

Not according to Helen Milner, the managing director of UK Online Centres, an organization that works with both the public and private sectors to bring technology to everyone in the UK. On Tuesday evening, I had the great privilege to attend an invitation-only Channel 4 sponsored debate entitled Recasting The Net chaired by Charlie Beckett director of LSE’s Polis institute, which featured Milner, Channel 4's open-source idealist Tom Loosemore and the surprisingly wired editor of the ancient Spectator news weekly, Matthew d'Ancona.

The real subject of last week’s debate was social justice on the Internet and it was Milner who, for better or worse, stole the Channel 4/Polis show. She spoke impassionedly on behalf of the 25% of people in the UK who, she claimed, have neither access to the Internet nor knowledge of how to use digital technology. This 21st century unwired class, Milner suggested, was the new lumpenproletariat cast adrift in an increasingly online centric world of cheap and convenient Internet services and goods.

Milner is certainly right in some ways. The old digital divide is now a chasm. The 25% of people in the UK who have no access to the Internet are, indeed, profoundly unequal with the rest of us – the 75% who have the good fortune or wisdom to know our way around the Internet. As Web 2.0 morphs into the raging real-time stream of services like Twitter, those poor souls who don’t even know how to send emails are, like their mid 19th century handworker ancestors, doomed to analogue oblivion. Luddism is for losers. Aside from the super rich who can afford their own Internet butlers, technological ignorance is the symbol of failure, the red cross of shame, in our Darwinian digital “democracy”.

But what should be done? The unfortunate truth is that innovation isn’t fair. Nor is the Internet, especially today’s real-time web. Rather than creating more equality, it has actually generated massive accumulations of power amongst a tiny new elite of attention-economy aristocrats like Silicon Valley new media baron Tim O’Reilly who has more than 500,000 loyal Twitter followers. For all the promises of democratization, real-time landed gentry like O’Reilly and increasingly monopolistic technology companies like Google and Amazon might actually be reinventing the radically unequal hierarchies of mid 19th century capitalism in the new digital age.

The problem with Milner’s argument is that she has a 20 century welfare-state style solution to a 21st century problem. At the Channel 4 debate last week, she suggested that we all somehow have a moral duty to help the unwired 25%. But is this really true? Without wishing to sound too self-helpish, how much should we do to drag the uninitiated into the network? Especially since the raison-d’etre of the Internet is rooted in individual innovation and initiative.

So my advice to the 25% of you out there who don’t have access to the Internet is pretty simple (not of course that you'll read this electronic message). Rather than relying on 20th century do-gooders like Helen Milner, you need to beg, steal or borrow to get yourself wired in the 21st century. Computers today often cost less than televisions and broadband access is about the same price as cable. Many of today’s mobile telephones are mini computers. There are now many libraries, schools, cafés, community centres and even churches with online computers. The digital future is yours. But only the networked will survive.

Virtuosos of the moment

2009-05-29T21:05:34-07:00

What’s the connection between Michael Moritz, Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalist, and Hizb’allah, the Middle East’s leading terrorist organization? According to Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author of the stimulating The Age of the Unthinkable, Moritz and Hizbollah are both able to think and act like revolutionaries in a contemporary era defined by surprise and innovation. They are both “virtuosos of the moment” able to leverage the complexity and unpredictability of today’s world in order to the realize their goals.

All new media entrepreneurs should read The Age of the Unthinkable. The ability to think and act like a revolutionary is what distinguishes the grand digital innovators – virtuosos of the moment like Steve Jobs, Mark Andreessen, Larry Page and Sergei Brin -- from everyone else. And Ramos’ message is acutely pertinent today, as the moribund Web 2.0 world is being swept away by the revolutionary stream of Twitter and its ecosystem of real-time communications technologies.

This week and next represents a particularly unthinkable fortnight in the history of new media. Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Wave – an ambitious new communications platform for the Internet. On the same day, Microsoft announced the launch of Bing a search-engine designed to chip away market share away from Google’s quasi monopoly in search. Meanwhile, next Saturday (June 6) represents the much anticipated American launch of Palm’s Pre, a smartphone device upon which Palm have, quite literally, bet the entire company.

The contrast between Google and Microsoft is revealing. The static Bing search-engine appears neither surprising nor innovative – just one more example of Microsoft’s persistent failure over the last decade to innovate or surprise. In contrast, Google’s Wave appears to be an attempt to reinvent both email and instant-messaging in today’s real-time Internet. As Lars Rasumussen, the Sydney based engineer driving the Google project said, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.” With Wave, Google is once again trying to revolutionize new media. In 1999, the launch of their user-generated search engine was the first barricade stormed by the Web 2.0 revolution. In 2009, Wave might represent a similar landmark in the unfolding of the real-time web revolution.

So is Palm like revolutionary Google or reactionary Microsoft? When Palm demonstrated early versions of its smartphone at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, many pundits were sufficiently impressed to describe the Pre as a legitimate iPhone killer. But I’m not convinced that the Pre will save Palm. To borrow again from Joshua Cooper Ramos, the Pre appears to be neither shockingly innovative nor surprising. It will, of course, be a highly competent and well engineered product that doesn’t disgrace itself against the iPhone – but, in today’s turbulent new media economy, competence is Microsoft rather than Google, it’s Bing instead of Wave.

Joshua Cooper Ramo described a conversation with Michael Moritz in which the Welsh born partner at Sequoia Capital – who famously discovered Google, Yahoo! and YouTube -- explained his success as a technology investor. What Moritz looked for in young companies, he told Ramo, is the ability to “pivot”, to perpetually reinvent themselves in an Internet economy that is, itself, in endless flux. It’s no coincidence that Moritz invested in Google, but not in Microsoft or Palm. In the age of the unthinkable – from the rugged mountains of southern Lebanon to the gentle flatland of Silicon Valley -- only permanent revolutionaries survive.

Wolfram Alpha versus Twitter

2009-05-24T20:13:18-07:00

What is the future of wisdom on the Internet? Let me offer two quite different versions. The first is scientific wisdom distributed out over the global network by a supposedly super sophisticated computer. The second is wisdom distributed in real-time by a global network of super ordinary human beings. The first is a new Internet service called Wolfram Alpha; the second is the real-time social media network Twitter.

The just launched and hugely hyped Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of the American based, Eton and Oxford educated Dr Stephen Wolfram, a boy-genius physicist who got his PhD by the time he was twenty and who is the founder of the computational engine Mathematica. Described by no less than the London Independent’s Andrew Johnson as “the biggest internet revolution for a generation” and “an invention that could change the Internet forever”, Wolfram Alpha claims to be a hugely powerful and sophisticated online computation data engine that retrieves information via the worldwide web.

In contrast with the Internet trawling Google, Wolfram Alpha has aggregated and curated huge amounts of data from established offline scientific sources. It’s what Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain calls a “computable almanac”, designed to juxtapose data in myriad ways. Wolfram Alpha then is a taxonomist’s wet dream, a computational engine that, in principle, enables scientists to splice and dice reliable knowledge to their heart’s content.

My problem with Wolfram Alpha is that while it all sounded very exciting in theory, it doesn't appear to work very well in practice. Currently, there's too much Alpha and not enough Wolfram. Everything of importance that I entered into the computational engine -- my date of birth, my ideology, my religion and my football team -- resulted in either useless, self-evident or confusing information. And when I entered all five of these simultaneously, it failed to retrieve me from its computational engine. Given the massive hype around its launch (mostly invented/invited by Wolfram Alpha's PR department), I assumed at first that it was me and not Wolfram Alpha at fault. My own gross scientific ignorance, I assumed, was stopping me realize the full power of the newest new thing that, we've been told, is about to change the Internet forever.

But belittling myself doesn’t come naturally. So I went onto Twitter for a second opinion on Wolfram Alpha. Having experienced the wisdom of Stephen Wolfram’s computational engine, I turned to the wisdom of my handpicked crowd. I tweeted my followers:

“Don't understand Wolfram Alpha…..Is it for real?”

And the replies I got confirmed all my suspicions about the general uselessness of the product. Wolfram Alpha really didn’t work according to almost everyone in my network. Purely designed for scientific geeks, it had little value to general Internet users like you and I. My favorite answer was from Hugh McLeod, the noted cartoonist and author of the hilarious new book Ignore Everybody, who tweeted:

“Short Answer: Nobody knows.”

When nobody knows, nobody cares. Compared with Wolfram Alpha, Twitter – a simple to use instant-messaging network -- is built on radically unsophisticated technology. Yet even today Twitter works as a retriever of wisdom. Instead of a computational engine, it contains a human engine that spits back useful knowledge in real-time from trustworthy people with who I choose to communicate. What’s lacking in Wolfram Alpha are similarly transparent human-beings. I suspect that it's just another of those "transformational products" that everybody will ignore. I wonder if the wise Dr Stephen Wolfram is on Twitter.

Is the stream passé?

2009-05-17T21:58:33-07:00

In today's London Sunday Times, columnist Bryan Appleyard quotes David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London & author of the excellent Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 about the Internet's revolutionary qualities. “The internet is rather passé," Edgerton told Appleyard, "It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

In a sense, of course, Edgerton is absolutely right. For example, much of the debate between bloggers and professional journalists about the future of newspapers has become painfully passé. The endless backwards and forwards in which everything is discussed and nothing resolved reached one of its messy little anti-climaxes this weekend, first with the publication of a reactionary op-ed in the Washington Post by a couple of big-media lawyers, then with the equally predictable response of orthodox mainstream-media bloggers like Koz & Jeff Jarvis.

But not everything about the Internet is passé. In the past, this Internet has appeared, as Edgerton says, "like television, radio or newspapers." Thus this endless debate about how "old" media would become "new" media and how print newspapers would morph into digital businesses. But, as Clay Shirky so elegantly argued in Thinking The Unthinkable, the old doesn't conveniently translate into the new and there is no certainty that newspapers will ever be reinvented. So we seem to be stuck in historical limbo, caught between the destruction of newspapers and the non-appearance of whatever it is that will replace them.

Maybe that's because most of us are looking in the wrong place. Alongside the staleness of the blogging/MSM debate, a new, more interesting -- albeit inchoate -- discourse around real-time media is emerging. Driven by daring thinkers like Steve Gillmor & John Borthwick, it suggests that the Internet is fundamentally being transformed from a controlled distribution flow of information into what Borthwick calls "a real-time stream of data". Twitter and its rich ecosystem of applications is, of course, the best example of the real-time stream. So is Friendfeed and the latest version of Facebook.

David Edgerton would probably argue that the real-time stream is another example of the shock of the old -- "just a means of communications". But in contrast with either Web 1.0 or 2.0, I think that it's a fundamentally different means of communications from television, radio or newspapers. The real-time stream not only changes all the rules and practices of traditional media, but it also transforms communications into the 21st century first mover, the thing-in-itself. Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld gets it. He says we should jump into the stream:

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

Schonfeld is right. I'm not entirely clear where the stream is taking us, but surely it's better to be drowned in the torrent of real-time media that to be suffocated to death by the torturously boring debate between bloggers and journalists. Both newspapers and blogs have become passé. The stream is the new. Don't let it pass you by.

Tweeting the real-time song

2009-05-09T11:14:33-07:00

The killer song this spring in Silicon Valley has been real-time chirruping of the little Twitter bird. First Twitter, the micro-messaging network founded by Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams in March 2006, grew its user base by over 1000% between the Spring of 2008 and 2009 – making it by far the fastest growing social network on the Internet. Then Oprah, that most viral of American media high-priestesses, noisily opened a Twitter account and acquired 900,000 followers in less than a month. Then Facebook, the social networking leviathan with over 150 million users, tried in its latest incantation to reinvent itself as a real-time Twitter service. Finally, in a mid April nail-biting race to the million follower mark, Hollywood actor and model Ashton Kutcher narrowly beat out CNN by 1,200 followers.

So it’s not surprising that some of the big media and technology cats are now trying to get their greedy mitts on that little tweetie bird. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, even, most bizarrely of all, the New York Times are all now rumoured to be interested in acquiring the venture capital backed, San Francisco based company. The supposed price has been inflating as quickly as the number of Twitter users: $200 million, $500 million even $1 billion – not exactly small change for a start-up without any revenue or even a business model. And then last week, Biz Stone appeared on ABC’s “The View” television show and cheekily told host Barbara Walters that Twitter wasn’t for sale. Clearly something is up.

What would you get if you bought Twitter? According to the now immortal words of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, you’d be buying a “poor-man’s email system” – which is how he described Twitter at a Morgan Stanley technology conference earlier this spring. So why is Google supposedly so keen on buying Twitter? The answer, naturally, is search. Many Silicon Valley pundits believe that the next big thing will be real-time search and that Twitter, with its hundreds of millions of short messages, houses an phenomenally rich informational seam that could rapidly make the Google search engine seem out-of-date. But while Google obviously needs Twitter, it’s less clear if Twitter needs Google. Last year, Twitter acquired Summize, a search engine of its own which could enable it to become Google 2.0 without having to answer to Eric Schmidt.

Twitter, of course, it is more, much much more than just a poor-man’s email system. With it seductively simple interface, its intensely viral community, its real-time communications technology and user-controlled features, Twitter is represents not only the future of the Internet, but probably also the future of media. Thus the rumored interest in Twitter of companies as diverse as Microsoft, Amazon and the New York Times.

Then there’s Apple, the most insurrectionary of Silicon Valley companies, who have been linked to a Twitter acquisition by the normally well-informed technology blog Techcrunch. Why would Apple want to buy Twitter? Because, I suspect, locking Twitter into their iTunes store and iPhone network would provide valuable individual brands like @oprah and @aplusk with a remarkably effective marketing and sales platform to distribute their products. The Twitter-Apple cat then would be truly amongst the old media pigeons. Merging the revolutionary Twitter into insurrectionary Apple would be one more nail – perhaps the final nail -- in the coffin of traditional record labels, publishers and television and movie networks.

In 2009 the page has turned on the book biz

2009-05-02T13:21:13-07:00

The medium isn’t always the message. In his 2000 best-seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the American pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell described a “tipping point” as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point" when change becomes unavoidable and inevitable. But Gladwell didn’t use his Tipping Point – a printed book that was mass published and sold through both traditional and online bookstores -- to either discuss or execute fundamental change within the publishing industry.

Today, almost ten years after the publication of the Tipping Point, the medium has finally caught up with the message. Till now, of course, while the Internet has savaged the newspaper and recorded industries, it has had much less impact on the book business. But in 2009, one big thing and many little things in new media have conspired to bring the traditional publishing industry to a boiling point. Writers, publishers and readers have collectively reached that moment of critical mass, at a threshold of fundamental change from which, like it or not, they can’t retreat.

That one big thing is digital book technology. Till now, the e-book has been more breathless theory than digital practice. But now with the growing popularity of the second generation Amazon Kindle (only still available in the US), the Sony Reader and persistent rumors of an imminent digital reading device from the dominant American book retailer Barnes and Noble, the idea of replacing the bulky print book with a convenient digital device is becoming increasingly attractive to more and more readers.

Digital has even begun to revolutionize the printing process itself. A couple of weeks ago, publishing industry professionals at the London Book Fair were treated to demonstration of the radical new Expresso Book Machine – a digital contraption that prints books on demand in under five minutes. This so-called “ATM for books -- the invention of ex Random House publisher Jason Epstein – changes everything about traditional retail bookstores. With the Expresso Book Machine, book retailing has suddenly gotten very flat -- the tiniest bookseller now having access to the identical inventory as the megastore.

But it’s the little changes in the publishing industry that are really making all the difference to the publishing business in 2009. Some of these changes are connected with the ecosystem of the e-book. Take Apple’s iPhone app store, for example, which is featuring more and more digital applications -- such as Scroll Motion, Short Covers and Classics -- for reading e-books on the telephone. Indeed, the Apple store has become so popular with readers that Amazon last week announced its acquisition of Lexcyle, the company behind the most popular iPhone app -- the Stanza e-reading interface.

Then there are the increasingly innovative changes to the way in which traditional publishers are packaging and selling digital books. A couple of weeks ago, for example, Random House UK launched BookAndBeyond, an enhanced ebook initiative which provides consumers of ebooks with interactive audio and video interviews and features from popular authors like James Patterson, Lee Child and Marcus Zuzak.

And so, without huge fanfare, Gladwell’s tipping point has caught up with the book business. The age-old reality of distributing centrally published print books through retail stores is being replaced by a new reality of interactive e-books and an evolving ecosystem of supply and demand. 2009 might, therefore, be remembered as one of those rare moments when the paradigm really does shift; it’s the year that the medium seems to have finally caught up with the message.

Apple defies economic gravity

2009-04-26T07:49:05-07:00

As the global economic crisis shows little sign of relenting, it’s been another brutal week in tech. News Corp digital chief Jonathan Miller fired MySpace’s two co-founders, CEO Chris DeWolfe and president Tom Anderson. A Swedish court sentenced the two founders of the Pirate Bay web service to a year in prison. Yahoo! announced plans to lay off another 5% of its staff and finally shut down GeoCities, the archaic web hosting company it bought for $3.6 billion in 1999. Joost, at one point the great hope of online video, is reportedly now up for sale. Even Microsoft announced a 6% annual drop in revenue, the first the Redmond, WA based company has reported since it went public in 1986.

Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell described the current business conditions as "the most difficult economic environment the company has faced in our 30-year history". But for Apple, Microsoft’s greatest rival over the last twenty five years, the most serious global economic crisis in a century has had little impact on the company’s remarkable growth.

Yes, in the midst of all the general economic carnage, a Steve Jobs-less Apple continues to defy economic gravity. Announcing its first quarter 2009 sales to Wall Street last Wednesday, Apple revealed a net profit of $1.2 billion on overall sales of over $8 billion. Leading the Apple miracle were 3.79 million iPhones sold in 81 countries, more than double the number from the same quarter last year. And last week Apple also celebrated the billionth download from its 9 month-old App Store which now features more than 35,000 different iPhone apps.

The iPhone is more than just a successful hardware product. With its telephone and Internet access, the pocket-sized iPhone is driving the real-time communications revolution. Without the iPhone, fashionable real-time services like Twitter wouldn’t have taken off so meteorically. The iPhone has swept away the traditional boundaries between a mobile telephone, a web browser, a computer, a portable entertainment system, and even an e-book reader. It is now the critical vehicle of both old and new media.

So is the iPhone invulnerable? Palm certainly hope it isn’t. This once iconic Silicon Valley firm has bet everything on a new iPhone style device called the Pre which will be launched in the summer. Google’s promising Android telephone will also be out later this year, while Research in Motion’s popular BlackBerry family of devices (which I myself own & cherish) remains the iPhone’s primary competition amongst business users.

But my money is firmly on Apple. If the rumors that it will release a $99 third generation iPhone in early June at its World Developers Conference in San Francisco, expect sales to at least double again in the second half of 2009. Whatever happens to the world economy over the next eight months, 2009 will likely be remembered as the year that Apple overtook both Microsoft and Google as the critical engine of the new media economy.

Blogs are dead; long live the blog

2009-04-19T12:10:26-07:00

Is blogging dead? Last year, questioning the future of the iconic weblog would have had me institutionalized. But today, in the face of the dramatic explosion of real-time social media services like Twitter, the future of blogging is far from certain.

It’s not just me questioning the blog. Last week, I was in Amsterdam, with a thousand of my closest new media friends, at The Next Web, one of Europe’s biggest and best tech conferences. And the words whispered in the Next Web hallways about the future of blogging weren’t always promising for the venerable digital institution. Some pundits at Next Web – such as Hermione Way, the London based founder of Newspepper and the presenter of Techfluff – have even begun to pen their obits to the blog. “Blogging as we know it is dead,” Way told me over dinner one evening at Amsterdam’s Loup restaurant. “It’s finished.”

Are these reports about the death of blogging exaggerated? At that same Loup dinner that Way announced the death of blogging, Matt Mullenweg, the San Francisco based co-founder of the open-source blog company WordPress, announced its resurrection.

“Blogs will become aggregation points,” the shamefully youthful, soft-spoken Mullenweg explained, as he mapped out the future of blogging for me between bites of Dutch smoked salmon. “They will become our personal hub. Places where we store all our personal media content such as our flickr photos and Twitter posts.”

I suspect that Mullenweg is right. When blogging was invented in the late Nineties by my dear Berkeley friend and neighbor Dave Winer, it represented an easy self-publishing tool, a simple way to publish dirty great lumps of one’s own static text. But just as the Internet has dramatically evolved over the last ten years from a self-publishing into a real-time broadcasting platform, so blogging is transforming itself with equally dramatic vigor.

With its 10 to 15 million users and blue chip media clients like the New York Times, CNN and the Wall Street Journal, Mullenweg’s WordPress epitomizes these changes. What distinguishes WordPress from some of its competitors is its open-source foundations. This open architecture has fostered an free ecosystem of 5,000 plug-ins that enable WordPress users to do everything from incorporate their Twitter feeds, videos and photos, to even managing their own independent record label.

And last week, WordPress released two new products – Buddy Press and P2 -- that underline Mullenweg’s vision of the blog as an aggregation point for all our media information. Mullenweg described Buddy Press to me as “Facebook in a box” – technology which enables WordPress users to create their own public or private social networks around their blog. While P2 is “Twitter in a box” which, according to Mullenweg, transforms the traditional WordPress blog into a real-time media experience.

So who is right about the future of the blog, Hermione Way or Matt Mullenweg? They both are, of course. The old static blog is indeed dying. But it’s being resurrected by Wordpress as a real-time social media personal portal. The blog is dead; long live the blog.

Friendfeed versus Twitter

2009-04-11T08:27:11-07:00

Twitter might be the newest new thing for millions of Internet users but, for most of Silicon Valley’s hardcore geekerati, it is Friendfeed that remains the hottest social networking application. If Twitter is emerging as the Microsoft of the emerging real-time Web, then Friendfeed – which unveiled a major upgrade to its interface last week -- is akin to Apple in its ability to muster a noisy following of hardcore evangelists.

Friendfeed, which was founded in 2007 by a group of ex Google engineers, is a real-time aggregation service that automatically incorporates updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and any other online content published with an RSS feed. Dramatically more subtle and complex than Twitter, Friendfeed is currently the most ambitious social media application on the Internet, particularly in the ways in which it empowers real-time public and private conversation between its subscribers.

What is striking about Friendfeed is the remarkably passionate responses it elicits from normally sane people. For me and other mainstream web users who crave simplicity and ease-of-use from their Internet tools, it remains an irritatingly over-engineered and elliptical application, the Internet version of Rubik’s Cube. And this may explain why Friendfeed currently has less than 7% of Twitter subscribers and has fewer users now that it had six months ago. Yet, for highly credible Silicon Valley pundits like my fellow Gillmor Gang members Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor, Friendfeed represents the next big thing in social media.

In spite of my own admittedly rather irrational antipathy to Friendfeed, I certainly urge everyone to sign up with this free service and try it. Whatever one thinks of Friendfeed, this real-time application is, without question, a major technological achievement which, in some shape or form, represents the future of the real-time Internet. The most interesting way for non-geeks to try Friendfeed is to test-drive it alongside Twitter. The chances are that you’ll either love or hate it. Like a good Rorschach Test, your reaction to Friendfeed is probably an accurate indicator of your general attitude to the conversational value of real-time social media.

Given Twitter’s phenomenal popularity with mainstream Internet users, it’s hard now to imagine that Friendfeed can now effectively compete as a straightforward consumer application. As Techcrunch founder Mike Arrington wrote last week, “Friendfeed is in danger of becoming the coolest app no one uses”. But perhaps Friendfeed will emerge as a platform for third party social media developers who can add useful new features – such as real-time video or audio.

That said, I do think that it is unwise to ignore the significance of Friendfeed’s hardcore evangelists. A year or two ago, many people (including myself) were sneering at the value of Twitter. But early adopters like Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte and Steve Gillmor persevered with the service and now Twitter is growing by more than 30% a month and, according to the web metrics firm Comscore, had around 10 million unique visitors in February. Maybe it is Scoble, Laporte and Gillmor, and not me, who are right about Friendfeed. I hope so. Little would please me more than to be proved wrong about the value of Friendfeed.