My ex-boss, John Furrier, goes after Facebook after Facebook blocked Google’s Friend Connect from using its API to inport friends from Facebook into Google’s Friend Connect.

I saw Dave Morin, who runs Facebook’s developer platform, at Google’s event Monday night. You can see him at the end of the event where I shoved my cell phone in his face and tried to get him to comment. He refused.

After the camera is off he said it was “interesting” that Google had used Facebook as one of the examples during its launch of Friend Connect.

I guess it was a lot more than “interesting.”

They blocked Google because they didn’t want Google to populate its friend network with data collected from Facebook.

Oh, I know, that’s not the real reason they told TechCrunch and others. Here’s the official statement from Facebook.

Facebook is being consistent here. Dave Morin told me a few months ago all about Facebook’s concerns. Such as, what happens if you change your email address, will it change everywhere that your email address got copied to?

Clearly with Google’s Friend Connect the answer is “no.” Why? Because it was a one-time action and there was no live connection back to Facebook and Google’s Friend Connect’s data would get older and older (and more and more out of date). Want to delete your email address off of the Web? Sorry, thanks to other systems Facebook can’t ensure that’ll happen.

Now, I’ve been on both sides of this story. A few months ago I tried using some unreleased technology from Plaxo to do exactly what Google did on Monday night. I not only got kicked off of the API (which is what should have happened) but my account was hidden and I was locked out for about 20 hours.

Facebook’s “penalty” for that behavior was way too harsh. And, some, like John Furrier, believe that Facebook is on the wrong side of the line tonight again.

Me? I think Facebook has a point, but I think the horse is out of the barn already and Facebook won’t be able to shove it back in.

Why? You should check into Minggl. It’s a toolbar that does far more than what Google’s Friend Connect does.

But it does it in a way that Facebook will never be able to block. Why? Because it’s your browser that scrapes all your friend’s info into Minggl’s browser bar. That bar then uploads all that information back up to Minggl. There’s no way that Facebook will be able to block Minggl. If Google wants to push the issue they should do exactly what Minggl is doing.

To get geeky for a moment, Minngl is collecting that data with a separate IP address each time the same one your browser is using. If Facebook wants to block Minngl it’ll have to block you from browsing to Facebook. Facebook can’t do that to everyone, so Minggl has picked an architecture that makes it impossible for Facebook to block. At least using technical methods. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook tried to sue Minggl or other companies that use similar methods to collect data.

Privacy is dead.

Anyone who puts anything on a computer screen that they want hidden from public view should think again. I don’t think it can be stopped and the walled gardens that have built around Facebook and other social networks are temporarily walled at best. That data WILL leak out of the walls and already is. Facebook’s attempt to keep the walls up will prove unsuccessful.

Just ask former KGO Radio Talk Show host Bernie Ward. He was convicted of sending child pornography through email to someone else. If email isn’t a private medium then surely Facebook isn’t. (The person he was emailing those photos to emailed them to the authorities).

What do you think? Does Facebook have a point or is the horse already out of the barn?

UPDATE: This is being discussed at a much faster rate over on FriendFeed than over here.

UPDATE2: Google employee Kevin Marks says I’m wrong in comments here. Here’s his correction to this post: “Robert, you’re wrong about Friend Connect data getting stale. It’s fetched directly from your linked Friend Data sources, including other Social Networks, with short-term caching on Friend Connect servers. There is a live two-way connection - Friend Connect posts back events to the Social Networks’ activity streams when the user choses to do so.”

UPDATE3: Mike Arrington over on TechCrunch thinks I’m wrong on this post. But, if you read the comments over on his blog you’ll see we’re not that far apart.

FriendFeed takes up the slack, the rest of us go back to work and say “meh.”

Twitter sure knows how to grab defeat out of the jaws of success. Twitter was featured on BusinessWeek today.

We’re talking about this on Gillmor Gang right now, the audio will be up later.

This is my favorite thing that I filmed on my trip to Israel a few weeks back for FastCompany.tv.

What is it? It’s a session at the Kinnernet event (which is Yossi Vardi’s famous annual event that attracts geeks and entrepreneurs from around the world to spend a weekend hearing new ideas and creative approaches to living life). Thank you Yossi Vardi for inviting me to participate in this remarkable event — how remarkable was it? Well this is the event where Craig Newmark was my roommate (founder of Craig’s List).

Who gave this talk? Itay Talgam, an internationally-renowned conductor. Now, it’s not every day that I get to meet a musical conductor, not to mention talking about him on my blog. “But I thought you only talked about tech, Scoble,” I can hear many of you saying. Well, that’s true, but, heck, gotta change the rules sometimes otherwise things get too boring and predictable.

Anyway, this got the most raves of the sessions I heard about (several people have seen this talk several times in the audience).

What does he do? He studies the managerial styles of several of the world’s top orchestral conductors and lets you draw conclusions of what kind of managerial style works best for them.

During the talk I saw in myself the stupid things I was doing as a manager, which is pretty much his point and why he’s asked to give this talk around the world.

Because it is so long we split it up into three pieces (the whole thing is more than an hour). Part I and II are up now, but part III will come later today. Hope you enjoy something a little different today.

Here’s the videos: Part I and Part II. Because I was having to film this myself without an audio crew, and had to stay to the side, sometimes I don’t have good audio or a good angle with the camera, but I don’t think those things get in the way of why this was fun.

What did you learn when you watched this?

Yesterday I visited two businesses: one exciting, Sliderocket, and one boring, Bluepulse.

First, about Sliderocket, it’s a new presentation tool. Here is a video I shot with my cell phone yesterday with the CEO. I’ve been using it for my presentations and it’s a TON better than either Microsoft’s PowerPoint or Apple’s Keynote for giving presentations. We filmed a demo yesterday that’ll be on FastCompany.tv in June. This thing is sexy, visual, and well integrated into Web services like Flickr and Salesforce. In other words, it’ll get lots of hype from tech blogging journalists like you read over on TechCrunch.

But the second, BluePulse? You probably haven’t heard of them, but they have customers in 198 countries, have hundreds of millions of messages flying around their social network (which is only for users who have mobile phones) and have been grabbing up Silicon Valley’s top talent — they just got Christopher Nguyen who was director of engineering at Google. You can see part of that team in the video I filmed yesterday.

In a future interview that’ll be up on FastCompany.tv in a few weeks where we met former Google executive (this is the same office where YouTube started, by the way).

So, which one is more likely to succeed?

I have to bet on Bluepulse. Here’s why:

1. Market. The cell phone market is growing much faster than the market for PCs or Macs.
2. Competition. Bluepulse wins here big time. Why? Well, let’s assume you’re a kid in India and you get a new cell phone. Do you know of a social network for that cell phone? No. So, BluePulse isn’t having to convince you not to use an entrenched competitor. But look at Sliderocket. If that same kid gets a new laptop he’s probably heard of Microsoft Office and his friends probably use PowerPoint and so, now you’ll have to convince him that Sliderocket, something he hasn’t heard of, is better. That’s a LOT tougher of a job than Bluepulse has ahead of it.
3. Monetization. Bluepulse is building up HUGE engaged audiences that it knows a LOT about. Think about the things that a social network learns about you. Heck, start with just your location. This is stuff that advertisers will pay big bucks for. Someone using a presentation tool? You’ve gotta charge them cause advertising won’t fly in that business model. That’s a LOT tougher of a business to build.
4. Usecases. One thing is going to be working against Sliderocket for at least a few months: Powerpoint works offline. Now, Sliderocket has an interesting answer there (they are building an offline client with Adobe’s AIR technology) but that isn’t finished yet, so when Sliderocket comes out in July you won’t be able to develop presentations in a plane (you will be able to play them, but the real offline client will come later).

So, add all these things up and you’ll see that the more boring Bluepulse is far more likely to build a world-class business that we all talk about than Sliderocket does.

That all said, Sliderocket is one hell of a great product and I can’t wait to show you that sexy demo.

What do you think? Which business would you rather own?

If you aren’t a blogger you probably haven’t noticed this company named Disqus unless you really are paying attention when you leave a comment. But head over to Dave Winer’s blog, click on the comments, and if you leave a comment there, like I just did, you aren’t actually leaving it on Dave Winer’s blog. You’re using Disqus’s commenting service.

“So what?” you’re probably asking.

Well, there’s a few things that Disqus does.

1. It hooks into FriendFeed. Why does that matter? Well, if you register your Disqus account (like I have) all of your comments left on blogs that use Disqus’s service, will show up on FriendFeed. Look at my FriendFeed stream. You’ll already see my Seesmic video comments that I left on some other blogs.
2. In the past hour they just turned on video comments thanks to a partnership with Seesmic. Go here to see my first video comment left on Dave Winer’s blog.
3. There’s an identity system. I don’t have to sign into comment on anyone’s blog who also has Disqus implemented. For instance, when I went over to costpernews.com and left another video comment there, I didn’t need to sign in. Plus my comments have my picture on them, which makes it less likely that someone will steal my identity.
4. Disqus comments are spam resistant. Because they use a robust identity system across blogs they can kick people off who misbehave.
5. Disqus comments are threaded.

Sam Harrelson was the first one to report the Seesmic/Disqus news on his CostPerNews blog.

Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is because the video commenting system is quite nice. Easy to use and easy to watch.

This is yet another piece in connecting us all together in the real time system I call “the World Wide Talk Show.”

Here’s some sites that have the Disqus/Seesmic commenting feature turned on:

http://loiclemeur.com/
http://louisgray.com/
http://shegeeks.net/
http://winextra.com/
http://avc.blogs.com/
http://howardlindzon.com/
http://scripting.com

More will almost certainly come soon. I’m looking at this technology too. I’ve been talking with Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic (the folks who run my blog) and they are looking at a raft of things to do to make commenting better for WordPress.com users.

So, let the commenting wars begin!

If you are a blog owner, what do you think about Disqus? Like it? Recommend it to other people?

I was just reading feeds and it is 4 a.m. in the morning, so maybe I missed something here. But Marc Andreessen just spent quite a few words trying to convince me that Google’s Friend Connect doesn’t compete with Ning, the service he runs that helps companies build their own social network.

Now, if you compare Ning and Google’s Friend Connect head on, Marc is correct. They don’t compete. Ning is a complete social networking site that you can use without doing any coding. Friend Connect is a platform for building social networking features into existing sites (and more, but I’ll just focus on this one piece for the purposes of being clear here).

Look at it another way, though, and you’ll see that Ning and Friend Connect certainly does compete for the same users: people in corporations who want to add more social features to their existing Web sites. Very few corporate site owners, after all, will want to throw out everything they’ve done just to build some identity, commenting, and social networking features into their sites.

In Ning’s approach you gotta pretty much move your site over to Ning and really rethink things. At least that’s the way it’s always been presented to me.

In Google’s approach you just copy some JavaScript code over to your corporate site and, voila, you have a social network and features added to your site. Watch the presentation on Monday night that I filmed and you’ll see this demoed very well.

Reading Marc’s note, I’m not sure he got what Friend Connect does. That’s OK, I’m a little slow on picking it up too, which is why I videoed the Google event where they showed off what it is so I could watch it a few times and pick up on what they really showed off.

I can see why Marc would want his customers to think that Google’s Friend Connect isn’t a way to build a social network, but it sure looked like it is a competitor of Ning’s.

Now, in defense of Ning (and Ning’s competitors like Broadband Mechanics) Ning does a LOT more than what Google does so far.

But again, I doubt most corporate customers think they need everything that Ning offers. To many corporate customers Friend Connect will be just what the webmaster ordered and THAT has got to be causing Ning’s management to be concerned. Certainly enough to write a blog post trying to distance their offering from Friend Connect.

What do you think?

UPDATE: Marc Andreessen wrote me back already and said that his target market for Ning is NOT corporate customers who want to add social networking features to their sites. Looking at their site it looks like Ning is going almost wholly after consumer market. OK, if that’s true, then Marc has a point.

You can’t compare a $3,000 digital SLR to a $500 cell phone from Nokia, can you? Well, look at these two photos. Which one was made with the Canon 5D with a 50mm F1.4 lens and which one was made with a Nokia N82 cell phone?

You can visit my Flickr account to see which camera made which images and you’ll see some other comparison photos and other images that I’ve made with the Nokia N82. Make sure you click on the “All Sizes” option to see the full resolution images to really compare.

Yes, if you look closely the images made with the pro SLR are nicer, but that isn’t the point. The point is that photos made with cell phones are getting to be darn good. The worst photo you’ll ever take is the one you don’t take because you didn’t have your camera with you. I don’t know about you, but only photo geeks like Thomas Hawk take their pro cameras everywhere (he shoots with a Canon 5D). I know I carry my cell phone everywhere, but only have my 5D a small percentage of the time, so I’m far more likely to get a shot of something interesting with my cell phone. Speaking of Thomas, he wrote two great posts yesterday. First is on the 10 things he learned from Ansel Adams. The second is about 12 ways to never miss a photo opportunity.

How does the N82 compare to the older N95? The camera is better and I like the phone overall better with one glaring problem: it doesn’t work with AT&T’s 3G network, so doing video on Qik on the N82 isn’t nearly as nice.

Yesterday I visited five companies to get you the latest that’s happening in the tech industry.

Here’s the five companies I visited (now you know why my email isn’t getting answered):

1. Xobni. This is a cool add-on for Outlook. Tim O’Reilly has been raving about it on his blog. I’ve been using it for about a week and it lets me see patterns in my email that I wasn’t able to see before. I spent a lot of time with the founders talking about their business and the industry. Sorry for splitting the video up into three pieces, but if the cell phone connection disappears for some reason it ends the stream and I have to restart it. I’m trying to get Qik (the service I use to stream these videos live) to address this and make it possible to join videos together. Part I; Part II; Part III.

2. LifeSize. HD videoconferencing. Pretty affordable compared to other HD systems I’ve seen (starts at about $5,000). Awesome quality and a good demo of state-of-the-art of what videoconferencing systems can do.

3. Vusion. HD streaming. Oh, my, is this cool for cable companies and others who want to bring you HD video to your computer. You need to download a small plugin, but once you do this brings the highest-quality video to your browser I’ve ever seen. This one too is in three parts, sorry for the cell phone troubles. Part I; Part II; Demo.

4. Equals. This is a startup that hasn’t shown anyone its main product yet, I get an exclusive first-look at what they are doing. Wow, what a new way to work using Twitter, social networks, phones, and more. If you only watch one, I’d watch this one. The CEO is a bit wordy, but the demos he shows me are interesting. Part I; Demo; Demo of separate product called Party Line.

5. Google. I filmed a few videos at the Google Friend Connect “Camp Fire One” (aka press/blogger conference). Short video of people standing around, including my former boss, Vic Gundotra. Short video of Mike Arrington and friends (goofy). Long video of entire press conference along with a few interviews at the very end.

Bonus video? Check out the video I did of Kevin Fox, famous interaction designer (used to work at Google, now works at FriendFeed). We talk about “Googly” design.

Today? I’m going to slow things down just a bit and visit Longjump. Gotta run, see ya later on my Qik.com account.

Remember when I cried over seeing something very cool at Microsoft Research?

Well now you can cry too, because the World Wide Telescope is now up.

Still is stunning, even a few months later.

Here’s the FastCompany interview where we meet the two guys who got this built and is what led me to declare I was crying.

I am playing with the new Google Reader for iPhone. Where am I playing with it? I’m sitting in the middle of Google’s campus. I’m still very disappointed. Here’s some of my disappointment:

1. Can’t share items from top level, like I can on Web page.
2. Can’t add notes to items, like I can on Web page.
3. I can’t see my friends, like I can on Web page.

I won’t tell you what I’m using on my iPhone instead cause I’ve already hyped them up too much.

UPDATE: see the comments here for an answer from the Reader Team (Mihai Parparita, engineer, told me how to see my friends).

PS: I still love the Google Reader web edition, just find the iPhone edition to have limited utility for me. You might like it though. Some of my Twitter friends say that’s how they read all their feeds (I bias my life around sharing feed items, so making me click through items to share makes me mad).