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Steve Gillmor's GestureLab

The Attention Operating SystemFebruary 12

Microsoft’s Yahoo takeover, whether successful short or long-term, marks an historic change in Microsoft’s perception of its role at the center of the computing universe. Certainly Google’s rise has focused the Redmond mind on the task it must confront, not just with Google’s advertising dominance but also its dagger to the heart of Microsoft’s crown jewels, Office. At its most basic level, the Yahoo deal allows Microsoft to clone Google Apps and blunt the hemorrhaging of a new Net-aware generation away from the current hardware bound Office.

We can argue whether the forced merger of MSN/Live and Yahoo’s services will be easy or difficult, but those who predict distraction and brain drain should remember that Ray Ozzie was the central factor in the IBM/Lotus acquisition that allowed continuity and pragmatics to preside over what turned out to be a successful combination. Notes and Domino achieved a critical mass in resources and seats that it needed to blunt the Y2K Exchange challenge, and IBM bought the time it needed to invest in open source and build out a platform for Global Services to ride on.

Similarly, Microsoft can use the Yahoo seats to deliver an 80-20 version of Office while financing the transition with improved response for brand advertising hung off of Yahoo media properties and rich media services such as Flickr. Banner ads don’t attack Google’s advertiser/relevance stranglehold, but they do pay for the migration to an on-deman

The 5th GuyFebruary 3

Conventional wisdom:

Social advertising doesn’t work because users are there for friends, not buying stuff.
Google reports weak results from MySpace deal, blaming missed numbers on bad estimates of social advertising yield.
Microsoft Yahoo takeover is about advertising.

Problems with that view for me, personally:

I don’t use search. Not externally, that is. I use Gmail search all the time, because my entire breadcrumb trail has been embedded there for 3 years now. So for me, search advertising doesn’t work, at all. My eyeballs are rarely focused on Adsense because they’re mostly focused on Twitter, gmail, and Google Reader shared items as triaged commonly via NewsGang. Mostly, I don’t search data, I search people’s searches of data.

So if search advertising doesn’t work with me (at least directly) what does that say about social advertising. For me, it works better than Google because it’s the affinity groups that I’m valuing, not the expression of my intent through keywords. Key to my information processing is understanding the context of the filter, not the descriptions of the containers or memes that surround the targets. That is the value proposition of Facebook and Twitter, which together conspire to route my attention dramatically more efficiently than previous methods.

Viewed in this lens, the Microsoft attack on Yahoo portends a dramatic shift in Redmond’s ability

NewsGang LivesJanuary 23

Today we recorded a new daily show, NewsGang Live. It is designed to take the fundamentals of The Gang and mix them with the daily flow of news and views that emerge from the NewsGang application. Today’s live show focused on last night’s Democratic debate in South Carolina, and featured members of The Gang (Dan Farber, Doc Searls, Dana Gardner) as well as Obama supporter Mitchell Kertzman and Edwards supporter Dave Slusher, plus several listeners including Chris Kelley who joined the end of the show with some Republican perspective.

The format of the show grows out of the most recent Gang episode, where Jason Calacanis gave out enough of the dial-in information on Twitter to attract some 20 additional callers, one of which, Larry Miller, joined the show and contributed both to the interesting aspects of the show and my gathering perception that the show is not working effectively to capture and nurture those aspects of The Gang and its predecessor The Gillmor Gang that endear it to both participants and listeners. Today’s NewsGang suggests that a careful mixture of various elements may produce a product that will justify continuing this work, though it is not clear to me that the members of the core Gang can work effectively together in the original structure.

On the second part of the last Gang, I clearly set out my requirements for the show. Much of the dichotomy of the show’s agenda revolves around what to some (i

Living in the FutureJanuary 16

Given Jobs’ purported secret meeting with Bill Gates in CES Vegas last week, I was on maximum alert today for Redmond DNA at the MacWorld keynote and aftermath. It helped that a Microsoft PR official denied the existence of the meeting, which only served to make it all the likelier that it occurred. Why call attention to it if there was no substance to it? Or put another way, if it did occur, and it was secret enough to escape the camera phone grid in Vegas, wouldn’t Microsoft PR have to deny it. Or maybe PR was out of the loop too a la Ron Ziegler.

Other than a pushback from an HP guy to the effect that Craig Mundie said Silverlight integration with the iPhone would never happen, there were no obvious clues in the lobby after the SteveNote. Of course, in keeping with the PR denial, the fact that I made up the Silverlight scenario out of whole cloth made it more than a little interesting that an HP official had actually discussed such a thread with Mundie before I had even made it up. Given the wave of exits from Microsoft Classic in recent weeks (Jeff Raikes, Charles Fitzgerald, Gates’ glidepath) my bet is whatever Mundie says may be irrelevant in the reasonably near future. But then you have to examine the breadcrumbs Jobs sprinkled around Moscone West.

For starters, the transitional upgrades to both the iPhone and Apple TV auger well for Jobs’ continued accupuncture approach to finding pressure points

The Open ContractDecember 23 2007

Fred Wilson makes an excellent case for why users should be more aware of where their data is being harvested. He raises concerns about Google’s aggressive march toward what can be loosely described as a data monopoly, where the scale of the pool of data creates a barrier to entry points for the startups Fred so ably funds and arbitrages. We can forgive his wrapping this economic imperative in a clarion call for the protection of innovation, but his point is valid as far as it goes.

How far that is depends on what you think about what he calls open data. Here’s how Fred puts it:

This sounds right on the surface; who could be against open data? Who could reject the notion that we have a right to control what happens to our behavioral data when we emit it around the network? Well, the answer for some time now is Web companies have offered services for “free” that carry an implied contract: ‘you get the software, you give us the data.’ The contract to date has not been ‘you get the software, you give us the data, we give you the data back so you can take it elsewhere.’

Part of the reason that hasn’t happened is that people have been happy with Gmail and Google Apps and Google Reader and so on. The lock-in has been user-mandated, a virtual frequent flier program: ‘you keep making it better; I’ll book more flights.’ ‘You make it all work best on the iPhone