Scoble Has the FriendFeed Religion!

Robert Scoble is religious. At least when it comes to being an early adopter of Internet technology. He had the Facebook religion. And the Twitter religion. Now he has the fervor for FriendFeed. I doubt it will move him to speaking in tongues, but hopefully he’ll go through a bottle of red and then get a video up with him on the whiteboard talking about how FriendFeed will kill Google.

I’m only mocking Scoble a little bit here in jest. I like early adopters and I admire his energy. Lord knows, I don’t have as much. I was in Fast Company before Scoble, but I was publishing on the Web before him, too. We didn’t call it Blogging back then, we just called it web publishing or having a web site. Back then I had more energy and cared a lot more. But that was 10 years ago and I was younger, dumber and more naïve, too. About two weeks after that Fast Company article came out I realized Microsoft wasn’t really all that interested in what I thought, but as an influencer of the influencers they wanted to make sure I didn’t go putting any wacky ideas into Walt Mossberg’s head.

Anyway, I think the third time may be the charm with Scoble religion. It's not a Google killer, but there’s something to FriendFeed and it goes like this: Facebook may be a better way to stay in touch with your real friends, but if you’re interested in “the conversation”, FriendFeed takes WAY better advantage of Zuckerberg’s notion of the beloved “social graph” than even Facebook does.

Getting to watch a conversation and not just among “your friends” but “friends of friends” who participate is very easy and unique to anything I’ve seen so far.

Under most circumstances for the more mainstream it’s probably just as big of a counter-productive time waster as most of all the other Web 2.0 crap, but in terms of following certain conversations it truly is cool and unique. But like Usenet before it, it's the type of thing that can get screwed up if it actually becomes more mainstream (the same is true for Twitter as well).

While I’m not sure how FriendFeed will make money, AdSense style advertising on FriendFeed seems like it might make more sense than it would on either Twitter or Facebook. I don’t see how that can be bad for FriendFeed. Either way I really hope Scoble goes to the whiteboard with why FriendFeed is a Google Facebook killer! ;-)

Jason Calacanis: One Step Closer to Owning the New York Knicks

I’d kind of like to see it. I remember the glory days of Earl Monroe, Clyde Frazier, Dave Debusschere, Willis Reed, etc. The Dolans have run the franchise for far too long now. New blood!

I was going to go with the headline of: “Facebook to buy Mahalo for TEN BILLION DOLLARS?”, but I didn’t want to get the Dolans too excited. People will be all over Robert Scoble for this (watch the videos, they’re worth watching), especially the Web 2.0 dweebs who don’t understand that most of the world doesn’t think the same way as they do.

Scoble predicts in four years time, Techmeme, Mahalo, and Facebook are going to cause problems for Google.

Though I’m sure it won’t have any impact on Google’s stock price tomorrow and I’m not as convinced Google can’t compete well with what he’s talking about, Scoble is on to something. And hats off to Scoble, as I’d have placed him as one of those Web 2.0 dweebs.

I don’t yet buy as Scoble does that it’s just not in Google’s DNA to do something like Mahalo (and Techmeme and Facebook) itself or just buy them, but I loved where in part 3 he riffed on Yahoo for a bit as being the potential wildcard in all of this. “Watch out for Yahoo!” (about the only thing that would’ve made that any better for me is if he had said, this means YOU Kara Swisher!).

I’m still agnostic on Mahalo, but I like the premise of it a lot and want to see what happens when they have 25K human edited pages. Jason’s play here is the 80-20 rule. He doesn’t plan for Mahalo to be as all encompassing as Google, instead going for the 20% of the searches that probably represent 80% of the search market. Though why Mahalo already has pages on bacon and kielbasa and not TV Ratings is…interesting.

But c’mon, don’t you want to see Calacanis high fiving with Spike Lee during the NBA finals?

Scoble’s plan that you would only find out about the videos via social networking and not Google went south in about 10 minutes (very good natured of Scoble to post the link via twitter himself). If anything Google has gotten better and faster over the last 6 months.

Note to Scoble: More white boarding videos, less blogging. You’re a natural!