Engadget has Creative Zen Vision about Microsoft "breaking some new ground" with a… Battlebot (?!) walking around with Sony Ericsson's new W600 Walkman Phone and chatting up how the Nintendo Revolution won't support HD.

AdJab covers AutoTrader's attacks, on Heinz one-liners, marooned on Gilligan's Island and then

According to an inside source I spoke to recently Sean Parker is being driven out of the company he founded, Plaxo.

Plaxo is an exceptionally effective, annoying and controversial social software tool that allows people to share updated contact info. So, I can update my contact info at Plaxo and my friends who are part of Plaxo will get it. It works really well—perhaps too well.

So many people are using the software that people with big networks get hammered by Plaxo with update requests. This forces them to join or to delete hundreds of messages a year. Not fun.

Also, Plaxo is clearly not a stand-alone business—it is s a feature of something bigger like AOL, Yahoo or Microsoft's MSN/Hotmail service. As such, people are very nervous about privacy and spam in relation to Plaxo.

Those issues are perhaps the reason Parker is being driven out.

Another powerful rumor I just heard—which also centers around Tim Koogle—is that AOL is talking about buying Plaxo (Tim is on the board).

This would explain the fact that when I asked Tim Koogle at PC Forum what Plaxo's business model was he had a long pause in which "to get bought" would have fit nicely.

Clearly Plaxo is a company that may never have a business model beyond being a really defensible feature of another person's service. We've all witnessed this model, some acquisitions that come to mind at AOL buying ICQ, Microsoft buying Hotmail, and Yahoo buying eGroups. None of these would have survived as stand alone business (how many free email, instant messenger or web-based groupware products do you know? How well are they doing?).

Adding to the potential validity of this rumor is the fact that AOL desperately needs features to cut their churn and Plaxo would be a great one, and the fact that Plaxo has been making the point that an acquisition would require the new owner to be very nice to the existing customer base—are they preparing us all for this eventuality.

If Plaxo is sold to an AOL it will be the start, or at least continuation, of a new round of acquisitions by the portals who took a couple of years off from buying sites.

I was speaking with a real insider in the social software space and they told me yesterday that Tim Koogle, the former CEO of Yahoo!,  is considering taking the CEO slot at Friendster and morphing the company into a search engine (this rumor has been around for a while.) Koogle is on the board of Friendster and is an early investor.

The concept is that all the data you and your friends put into Friendster would be the starting point for your searches. So, if you knew that me and my friends went to the follow tech related schools (i.e. MIT,) worked at the following tech companies (i.e. Yahoo, AOL, etc.,) and had computers and Internet in our interests field then you would tailor the search towards those verticals.

Google Personalized Search is obviously heading in this direction, and their launch of Orkut and failed attempt to buy Friendster makes this rumor believable to me.

I saw Tim Koogle at PC Forum last week and he was talking about Friendster a whole lot and he was chatting up a storm with people.  Hmmmmm…....

Update: David had the story first two days ago.

I asked Tim Koogle—while here at PC Forum—why people hate Plaxo. I told him how a dozen people from the conference had told me they would never use Plaxo because of fears of how they would use the data (i.e. spam, marketing, etc.) He said that it was an old myth that people have venom for Plaxo. Then I gave him the punch line—that I had gotten these emails in the last couple of weeks. I added that the reason people are concerned is because they have not revealed their business model.

Esther explained to Tim that he should make Plaxo's mission and the size of company clearer to the customers so that they would feel more comfortable with it.

When I asked Tim what the business model was — there was a long pause before he said it was either going to be a consumer pays, or an enterprise pays. I get the sense he didn't want to tip his cards. He said the pay trials would start shortly (as in any day now.)

John Patrick, one of the most respected guys at the conference, challenged Koogle to explain why we should trust Plaxo, or the FUTURE OWNER of Plaxo.

Esther pointed out you don't have to use Plaxo.

I caught up with Koogle over lunch and we had a nice talk, and I'm sure he wouldn't associate himself with anything nefarious. In fact, I love and use Plaxo everyday—it is a brilliant piece of software. However, I told Tim that I think that the product is so slick, so well-designed and so pretty that it scares people and that it would have been better if  they made it Craigslist style (that is, less slick.)

Update: People hissed when Plaxo was mentioned during Tim's introduction.

Update Two: In an audience poll of how many people have erased Plaxo requests almost everyone raised their hand. When ask if they had deleted more then 10 almost everyone kept their hands up. Not a shock, and it is certainly not spam—but it sure feels like it to people. If it walks like a duck is it a duck? 

I've finally landed at PC Forum, Esther Dyson's yearly high-tech conference. It was a horrible travel day thanks to the end of spring break and the start of spring training (i.e. baseball training camp). Ironically, I meet-up with MeetUp.com founder Scott Heiferman. Scott was supposed to speak at 5pm and so I collected his bags so he could high-tail it over to the event. The gamble worked and made it for curtain and I missed everything but the Q&A. Sorry to readers who wanted to rehash the horrific collapse of the the Dean campaign in relation to emerging technologies.

Steve Levy talked about a recent column where he founded an issue based site—Healthcareforallamericans.org – and joked that he would give the domain to the first pres candidate who knows how to use it. (crowd=big laugh).

Audience Question: How is the Internet impacting citizens without using the word money?

What the panel came up with (heavy paraphrasing follows): Issue organizations are growing in influence because of relationship management (think MeetUp, Friendster, etc). Technology helps groups project a common voice more effectively. The Internet is providing new ways of doing old things in politics (i.e. fund raising, organizing volunteers, etc). People are more involved and engaged—and that is not about money. We are seeing the emergence of a force outside of politics and the media—a "superset" of organizations exerting influence. The ability of the Internet to let people to self organize is a counter weight to politics as usual.

Esther Dyson brought up the concept of politicians opening up their APIs like Amazon and other companies are doing.

I'll start blogging panels tomorrow. I'll post some pictures tonight.

High-tech celeb sighting of the day: Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

A company called Organic Network is providing the wifi which has one very cool feature: when you login you can see who else is online. However, the system doesn't let you send a message to the person (or opt into a chat room, etc)

Looks like Joi Ito is giving up his VC business for now to focus on blogging software:

I have decided to discontinue additional investments from Neoteny and focus on supporting its current portfolio of companies. In particular, I believe that Six Apart has enormous potential and most of Neoteny's resources, including me will be focused on helping to make Six Apart a success.

Now that is an endorsement!

WIN (The Weblogs, Inc Network) blogger Judith Meskill got a huge plug in the Guardian… a first for a WIN blogger—excellent! They may have gotten your name wrong, but they got your URL right!

The expansion of the internet has brought this simple idea to the mass market, as illustrated by the emergence of at least two dozen Friendster-style websites including Microsoft's experimental Three Degrees (Judith Meskell (sic) is busy cataloguing more than a hundred at the Social Software Weblog. Most of the sites allow you to fill in your own profile, upload a photo, and add other people as friends.

You can say what you want about Tony Perkins, and a lot of people do, but he is doing something truly unique and of value over at AlwaysOn. A lot of people were getting all weepy about Tony being able to describe himself as a blog, or wondering outloud about whether he really understood the medium. Clearly he was an interloper!

Others cried about how Tony's site looked like one big advertisement for the participants. A fair critique since you have so many service folks posting to promote themselves (i.e. lawyers, accountants, executive search folks, etc.)

However, the bottom line is that Tony really is the first person who has pulled together a professionally produced blog (like Nick Denton, Rafat Ali and Weblogs, Inc. are doing,) a business social networking site (like LinkedIn and ZeroDegress,) and finally a user-based blog platform (like Moveable Type or Blogger.)

Now, putting these things together is not Tony's idea, and Tony's feature set doesn't compete with any of the sites I mention above on a one-to-one basis (i.e. TP's social software can't touch LinkedIn or ZeroDegrees.) The idea to combine these platforms has been out there since the start, so I'm not giving Tony any credit for the idea. However, you have to give Tony credit for actually doing it.

Brian and I have been thinking about user-blogs and social software for Weblogs, Inc. since we first came up with the idea. I'm not convinced that what Tony's doing will work on any grand scale, and I'm certainly not convinced he is going to get people to pay (although the self promotional service folks will pay to be on there all day long talking about themselves,) but he is going to be the first person to find out.

Ideas are a commodity, execution is everything.

Rock on TP!

PS – Tony, you gotta upgrade the software and servers—the site is still a total dog!

I've been playing with Tony's new social software and welogging tool (called Zaibatsu) over at AlwaysOn for the last 24 hours. It's very basic and horribly slow, that being said I think that social software and weblogging tools being built into existing communities is the going to be a huge trend.

I've always felt that the best magazines bring together, and capture, a community. Niche and trade magazines will benefit greatly from these features. Anyone who would pay $19.95 a year for a fly fishing magazine, or $199 a year for a legal software magazine would easily pay 2-3x that much for the ability to networking amongst the readers. I know if we had these features at Silicon Alley Reporter we would have had thousands of people paying $20 a month. This money would of course been almost pure margin.

Tony is charging about $60 a year for the service. I could see him hitting a couple of hundred subscribers in year one, and maybe a 1,000 by year two. $60,000 is not a lot of money. This is thing needs to be like $295 a year and add a bunch of value if he is going to make money off it. Until then he should just make it free and get a sponsor to pay $60,000 to underwrite it.

I don't really see the value in this model for larger magazines. What do the readers of People or Vanity Fair really have in common, and why would they need to network? Perhaps they could us it to date each other (as Spring Street has shown), or for a mini-EBAY (which hasn't worked so well)—but that is about it.

Someone just posted this to the group blog:

THIS THING IS A D-O-G!!!
rjohnson [] | 02.17.04 @23:49
TOPIC: Always-on Always Vulnerable

Can it be any slower? I can hardly use this thing. No doubt… WebObjects is a poor excuse for an application server. Ya shoulda used BEA. Too bad… you're in for a very rocky road with this one. Best of luck….

Oh yeah, in case you're wondering why Tony didn't register Zaibatsu.com it is taken by ThinkTank.com till 2011:

Registrant:
ThinkTank (ZAIBATSU7-DOM)
85 ENTERPRISE SUITE 100
ALISO VIEJO, CA 92656 US

Domain Name: ZAIBATSU.COM

Administrative Contact:
METCALFE, KAREN (35711201P) KAREN@THINKTANK.COM
85 ENTERPRISE SUITE 100
ALISO VIEJO, CA 92656 US
949-389-8102

I'm in Dan Brickley's "Fear of a FOAF Planet - Acronyms and Activism on the Semantic Web" panel right now.

He is addressing a bunch of problems with FOAF, like people lying about themselves and relationships.

He defines FOAF as "A web of files describing a web of people," and praises FOAF for being simple.

Says they didn't account for "lies, mischief, mistakes." There is no central control for people creating Faksters, and people can say anything about anyone, anyway they want, and because people host their own files there is no way to stop them.

Of course, I don't see this as an issue—people have lied since the beginning of time and if they do so on GeoCities, SixDegrees, Orkut or in FOAF what difference does it make?

Just got word from the CTO of Tribe.net who is down here at eTech that Tribe.net is going to support FOAF! So, you'll be able to import, export and search your friends list. 

Friendster?
Ryze?
Orkut?

When are you going to support FOAF!?!? If these other services don't support FOAF I think we should boycott. It is simply too much work to manage all these sites and they should not own and lock up OUR data. Let my data free Friendster! Let me export.

I'm at eTech at a panel on mobile social software applications (i.e. friendster, mobile phone, SMS, IM, etc,) so you're reading this on our wireless, social software, Calacanis or etech blogs right now.

The first company to present, Dodgeball.com, lets you tell a group of folks where you are on you mobile phone and then lets you know what other people are doing and where they are.

They put up a matrix of companies like Vindigo, meetup, UPOC, and Flash mobs with the variables: location, social, mobile and spontaneous. So Dodgeball.com does all of them, but UPOC does three of four (not location-based) and meetup does two of four (location and social, but not mobile or spontaneous). 

The cute part about Dodgeball.com is that users don't need GPS, instead they put in what bar you're in and then Dodgeball.com tells you other events going on around you. So, it is a hack but a good one. Of course the thing falls apart because it requires the user to say where they are as they bar hop, which users won't do (or will be too drunk to do.)

A second project, Fiasco, is a "street game for mixed physical/digital play." A final project is an interactive TV news service where the users can talk to the newscaster while they are reporting news (trust me, I do a lot of TV news, you wouldn't want to talk to a lot of the "talking heads" out there.) The community feature of the application was more interesting. A bunch of people can create a video chat room where they talk to each other while the newscast is happening. Of course this was the ORB that was done at NYU's ITP program a decade ago.

I'd rather pop in DVD and watch it with five friends online while we all comment on it. Sort of MST for my PC.

OK, off to lunch.

In my third panel, Untethering the Social Network or What Happens to Social Networks in the Untethered Wilds?,  moderated by Joi Ito. Howard Rheingold, Mimi Ito, Scott Fisher, Danah Boyd are joining Joi.

Howard is giving a history of communications from the phone to IRC to SMS right now.

The big take away for the panel is that you can't hack mobile phones. The carriers don't let you do anything with their systems, unlike PCs which are open. Ironically, mobile phones are more social then PCs. So, the more social device is closed, and the less social device (the PC) is open.

Another take away is that blogging is similar to sharing pictures on phones in that the sharing is occurring, for the most part, between a couple of people (as opposed to hundreds, thousands, etc.)

I'm in my second panel "Next Generation File Sharing With Social Software" by Robert Kaye, MusicBrainz.

This talk has basically focused on shifting the focus of P2P networking from quantity to quality by basically adding social software (i.e. browsing) to Napster and Kazaa. This idea has been around forever, I mean Kazaa and Napster did allow you to browse people's hard drives, but the idea here would be to do something a little more like Firefly or Amazon's "People who bought this bought that" feature.

Of course, the only reason this has not happened already is the RIAA coming down hard on everyone involved. In order to make this system work the speaker said you need to cloak your private social network by having SSH and having the network be invite only.

For now if you want to do this simply go to Friendster, click on your friends lists and see who they list in their music and movie choices, or better yet just send your friends a message asking for new music choices.