YouTube working on live streaming

I’ve been sitting here in the San Jose Convention Center where Google’s sales and operations team have been having an in-house event. Al Gore spoke yesterday and a bunch of bloggers were on a panel today. Anyway, random Googler’s have been coming by all afternoon while I’ve been using the wifi to keep up on the comments and Twitters coming in thanks to my redesign.

So, a few YouTube engineers have come by and I keep asking them if they are working on live streaming features. They are very aware they are getting outrun by streaming services like Ustream, Stickam, Justin.tv. They are more worried about cell phone videos like Qik, Flixwagon, Bambuser, and Kyte.tv. They tell me they see tons of people at concerts using their cell phones to record video and know that’s a big market that they’ll need to serve. Funny enough, several of them mentioned Seesmic and Seesmic’s new video comments. Since those are only five days old now, it’s surprising that they’ve gotten on the radar screen so quickly. Yesterday Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic, told me they are seeing huge growth and have hundreds of blogs who’ve already deployed those new comments.

The employees quickly add “you didn’t hear it from me” and aren’t willing to tell me dates or other details (the devil is in the details) but it’s clear that YouTube’s leadership realizes that they’ve slipped behind in innovation and are going to start putting out some new stuff to keep its brand fresh.

Looking forward to it. YouTube has a huge audience compared to all these other newer services, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do in response.

I’ve redesigned

“Finally,” Om Malik just told me after I told him about my redesigned blog that just went live. We were just on a panel discussion talking to Google’s sales team.

Some things you’ll notice: a prominent FriendFeed component. I’ve really become addicted to FriendFeed. It’s the best place to watch my interactions around the Internet. More and more of my time has been spent on places like Qik, Twitter, Google Reader, Seesmic, Upcoming, Flickr, YouTube, and commenting on other people’s blogs. In this redesign, done by a team at FastCompany’s offices in New York, we’ve featured many of those in my navigation bar too.

I’ve also added an advertising panel, so I’m sure that’ll start some discussion.

Sorry for being gone so much lately. Now you can see my calendar, and see just how busy my life has become. Plus, something about Twitter is more fun. Trying to say something in 140 characters does have its charms.

I’d love to know what you think. We’ll do tweaks over the next month or two as well.

What else should I add along the side?

Minggl shows future of social networking sites

Today Minggl came to my house and showed me their latest toolbar that joins Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and MySpace together. That’s pretty darn cool, although I can’t get it to work on Firefox’s newest betas (you gotta stick with old Firefox).

I’m trying it out on IE, and it is definitely the start of something interesting. What if such a toolbar could replicate all your photos between Flickr and Facebook? That’d be cool and a good way to defend against getting kicked off of Facebook.

Seeing the first Ethernet cable (and reusable paper) at Xerox PARC

I got a tour of Xerox PARC and got a look at a few research projects as part of a press day today. That all is pretty cool, you can see my videos over on my Qik page, there’s a few.

But the last one was pretty fun. The President of PARC, Mark Bernstein, gave me a tour around the famous lab where so much of our world was invented. We started at the first Ethernet cable in the world.

If you don’t know why Xerox PARC is so important, please read up on it on Wikipedia.

At the end of the interview I asked Mark if he met Steve Jobs the day that he visited back in the early 1980s (which was a famous meeting in of itself). I love his answer about that day, but I’ll let you listen to the video.

I have a feeling the wall in the video where the Ethernet cable is will eventually be cut out and put into the Smithsonian. It’s a hugely important piece of cable to our history. It was an honor to see it in place.

Here’s a video of the reusable paper that the researchers are working on.

Shhh, no one is on Twitter

If no one is on Twitter why am I getting a new Tweet every second?

Yeah, Kara Swisher’s friends aren’t on Twitter. Of course they are the same type who would look at you strange back in 1977 if you bought an Apple II for $5,000 like my dad did.

Jeff Clavier explains how this works.

Me? I have already turned off the autofollow because too many of Kara’s friends were following me. Heheh.

The users’ point of view on Microsoft and Yahoo

I’ve stayed out of the Microsoft attempted merger of Yahoo so far. But EVERYONE seems to be talking about it from all sorts of angles.

Me? I take the user’s point of view and that’s one I haven’t seen discussed much yet.

Will Yahoo moving to Microsoft be a good thing for users? Let’s take a tour.

Yahoo Messenger users and MSN Messenger users. Wash to bad things for Yahoo’s messenger. They already work together and I doubt that having two huge teams with two huge user bases of hundreds of millions of people trying to work together will bring much new. At worst case the Yahoo team will leave and so Yahoo’s Messenger will stop seeing new features.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users. Wash to bad things for Yahoo’s Mail. Same as with the messenger side of things. Eventually I can see Yahoo’s Mail get frozen and so bugs and things won’t get fixed on Yahoo’s side and I can see pressure (advertising, etc) to pull people off of Yahoo and put them on Hotmail or whatever they are calling it now (Microsoft Windows Live Mail).

Flickr. The users of Flickr are very scared of what a Microsoft purchase might mean. But here Microsoft has no significant player, so they’ll probably try to keep the development team intact. Plus, there are a lot of smart people at Microsoft who are into photography (Ansel Adams’ son Michael was at Microsoft Researcher Curtis Wong’s wedding, for instance) So, good things could happen here for Flickr’s users.

Delicious? No real Microsoft competitor and tons of Microsofties love Delicious, so good things ahead, just like Flickr.

Yahoo Maps and Live Maps? I like Microsoft’s Maps better, but there’s some tricks that Yahoo does better. So, if these teams get along we’d probably see an improved version of both services, although I doubt they’d remain separate code bases.

Yahoo Search and Microsoft Live Search? Microsoft is already gaining on relevancy, so that tells me there are still a few smart people at Microsoft working on search. They just don’t have a brand name worth s**t. So, Yahoo’s brand name on top of Microsoft’s search will help Microsoft out a lot. I doubt that we’ll see a Google killer out of the joining of these two companies, though. The sales teams will be joined and will prove profitable for Microsoft. For users, though? I doubt we’ll see anything for years in terms of dramatically better search.

Developer tools and such? Microsoft isn’t threatened by anything Yahoo is doing, although the Pipes and Fire Eagle and other Yahoo teams will probably love working at Microsoft. For users? Join those tools into Ray Ozzie’s new Mesh and we could see some cool new stuff.

Portals? Yahoo’s has more users, more respect, and more features. I don’t see anything major for users either way there.

Finance and Personals sites? I doubt users will see much change there.

So, for users, there’s some negatives, and some positives.

How do you see the Yahoo/Microsoft merger affecting users?

As to Microsoft employee morale? That’ll end up a positive in this deal. After all, Microsoft employees will see their stock go up, not down. That drives morale more than anything.

For board members? Marc Andreessen covers that.

Facebook continues to suck

People wonder why Facebook is getting nasty PR while last year everyone was singing its praises.

Here’s why.

Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz is a CEO of VodPod.tv in Europe. Not a spammer. Not an idiot. Not someone abusing Facebook.

Yet he still got kicked off.

Until this stuff stops I won’t use Facebook and won’t write nice things about it.

They say that Facebook is a “utility.” But since when does a utility just kick you off with no recourse?

Mark Zuckerberg: you need to fix this and now.

Rodrigo isn’t the only one, by the way. Every few days I get another email from someone who got kicked off and the thread about me getting kicked off has 500 comments now.

I guess Facebook really is just for college kids to poke themselves on. Oh well.