Mike Arrington and I had a sometimes violent disagreement on today’s Gillmor Gang.

The reason we were arguing? Because we both were arguing different things.

Mike Arrington was arguing that Facebook was in the wrong for blocking Google Friend Connect (and therefor I was wrong).

I was arguing that if you 1. Friend me AND 2. Give me your email address that I should be able to put that email address into whatever system I so please, just like when you hand me your business card (and therefor that Arrington was wrong).

Problem is, that it took a bit of yelling and screaming for us to realize we were arguing about different things. During the show I put my phone on mute and took a shower (actually true) and when I came back on I took a different tactic and agreed with Mike on the first issue.

On the second issue he’s still wrong, but we’ll get to argue that one out again some other day.

Truth be told I thought that Google pulled email addresses into Friend Connect. I was wrong. Google doesn’t.

So, Facebook is totally over the top wrong to block Google.

But, lately, Facebook has been on the wrong side of the block button. Whoever runs that button is really hurting Facebook’s brand and not doing Facebook any favors.

So, let’s back up and split this argument into a few pieces and argue about those separately in three groups:

1. Your social graph (IE, the map of who your friends are).
2. Your friends’ info (IE, their email addresses, their birthdays, their relationship status, their political leanings, their gender, their favorite music and activities, and other stuff you’ll find on, say, Facebook’s profile).
3. Your actual data. Say your photos, your videos, your status updates, and your wall posts.

If you’re going to talk about social network portability you MUST keep these three things separate.

Why? Because of user expectations.

So, what are our user expectations around the social graph? Well, Facebook already makes those almost totally public. I can see the social graphs of people who haven’t even friended me. That said, there are a few people who’ve blocked me from seeing who their friends are, but only a handful of people have done that.

How about user expectations around your friends’ info? Well, if you friend me and give me access to your data, you should expect me to use that data, even outside of Facebook. But there are some users who don’t want you to take that data outside of Facebook. Arrington’s one of those.

How about your actual data? User expectations here are far different. We want to have control of our own data, and we don’t expect other users to be able to copy our photos or videos to other places.

So, basically, Mike Arrington and I agree on the social graph. You should be able to take your list of friends, their avatars, and their names to any other social network.

We disagree on our info like email addresses and such. I don’t think we’ll ever agree there.

I believe we agree on the control of our actual data.

How about you? Do you agree with this assessment? Do you get as passionate about this stuff as Mike and I did?

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 too 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 ask, 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.

Privacy is dead. Anyone who puts anything on a computer screen that they want hidden from public view should think again.

Just ask former KGO Radio Talk Show host Bernie Ward. He was convicted of sending child pornography through email to someone else.

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 that in the video I filmed yesterday 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 Bluepulse for at least a few months: Powerpoint works offline. Now, Bluepulse has an interesting answer there (they are building an offline client with Adobe’s AIR technology) but that isn’t finished yet, so when Bluepulse 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.

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.

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!

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 features (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?

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.

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.

BBC: Twitter and the China earthquake.

I reported the Twitter quake to my followers before the USGS Website had a report up.

How did I do that? Well, I was watching Twitter on Google Talk. Several people in China reported to me they felt the quake WHILE IT WAS GOING ON!!!

Over the next two hours I pointed at anyone who had info about the quake on my Twitter account.

It’s amazing the kind of news you can learn by being on Twitter and the connections you can make among people across the world.

I fear a large casualty loss. The episcenter was 50 miles from Chengdu, which has about 10.5 million residents. Already reports are coming across of buildings that have been knocked down.

David Risley this morning wrote about all the noise in all these systems like Twitter and FriendFeed. Of course that kicked off a whole discussion over on FriendFeed.

Oh, the glorious noise! Everyone loves beating me up for causing the noise. No, I am not the cause. I pass it along. You should see my inbound streams. Every second or two a new Twitter is aimed at me. Every few seconds, a new blog post comes into Google Reader. Every few seconds, a new thing on FriendFeed.

24 hours a day of noise. And we’re not even counting the professional noise over on TechMeme and Google News.

Buried by noise.

So, how do we get out?

Well, we have a couple of choices.

1. We can choose to remain ignorant. Billions of people choose this route every day. Pop open a beer and pretend nothing interesting is happening in the world. That explains why American Media would rather talk about Britney Spears than about anything really important (like what Barack Obama’s new policies are).

2. We can try to swim in all the noise and soak it in. That’s what I do, but only a small number of people are going to have time or willingness to do that.

3. We can build noise reduction systems. Techmeme is one such system. It shows you only what the bloggers think is important. Google News is another. That shows you only what professional journalists think is important (or, at least their algorithms are designed to show you that and, while the algorithms don’t always match real-world behavior, they do get close enough to have high value).

4. We can use search to only present high value items. For instance, let’s say you work for my sponsor, Seagate, wouldn’t you be very interested in only items that mention Seagate? Like this search on TweetScan? Yes, you would. There’s still SOME noise there, but a lot less for someone interested in stuff about Seagate than there is coming through, say, TwitterVision, which shows a random selection of all Tweets being posted in the last few minutes.

The problem? Twitter and FriendFeed have brought new noise into our lives (at least for the early adopter types) and there aren’t good ways to reduce the noise.

But FriendFeed shows us a way out. How about seeing only posts that have at least two “likes?” Isn’t that a way to reduce the noise? Yes! In fact, my eyes are already doing that. I scan the page of FriendFeed looking for things that stick out of the noise and I’ve noticed that items with lots of votes and lots of comments stand out.

Tonight I’ll be attending a FriendFeed party and I’ll ask them just what their plans are in terms of giving us new views into their streams of info: one with noise, one with noise removed. Yes, of course I’ll post videos to my Qik feed and they get forwarded to my FriendFeed account too (which shows up on my blog’s sidebar too). More noise ahead! :-)

What kinds of noise reduction systems are you seeing? What kinds do we need?

Oh, and here’s a FriendFeed search for all items that include the word “noise” in them. That’s one reason I wrote this post. The noise has our attention and we need to damp it back down.

I just visited the offices of Lefora, free forum hosting, who is making cool new forum software that goes in interesting new directions that I haven’t seen forum software or services do yet. Stuff like embeddable YouTube videos with just copying the URL. And I +love+ the color theme selector they have.

You’ll see that in the video demo I just filmed with Vinnie Lauria, VP of product.

Paul Bragiel, CEO, told me a lot more about the company and its plans in a separate video.

An example of their new forums can be found on their “fun stuff forum.”

UPDATE: In just a few minutes Vinnie created me a forum.

New 3G iPhone is coming this summer, it seems. Will Patrick and I wait in line overnight again like we did last year?

No.

Why? Even though the line was a heck of a lot of fun, I think that’s a one-time deal. It’s pretty clear there won’t be any scarcity (there wasn’t any real scarcity last time, either) and I doubt Bill Atkinson (Apple’s first software developer) will come and wait in line overnight with us like he did the first time.

That said, I will be one of the first to buy the 3G version. I hope it has video on it.

The downside? With millions of people getting new 3G iPhones, I bet the speed and quality of AT&T’s 3G network will go down. In the United States there aren’t many 3G phones yet, and the ones that are out there suck for Web browsing, so other than a few freaks like me who are using it to broadcast video there isn’t much usage yet.

The 3G iPhone will change all that.

OK, over the past few hours I’ve gone crazy with Google Reader’s shared note feature. You can see how I’m using it on my shared items feed, which has a cool new ninja design (another new feature shipped yesterday).

It’s interesting, but leaves me wanting a LOT more.

For instance, if you share an item, add a note, I can’t pass those notes along to my readers. I can on FriendFeed, though.

I also can’t edit my notes. You can on FriendFeed though.

I also can’t comment on your notes without resharing an item, which causes duplication of an item if I’ve already shared it. You can do that on FriendFeed, though.

Are you noticing a theme? Is it any surprise that I’m seeing lots of early adopters move their reading behavior from Google Reader onto FriendFeed?

Discuss this either here, or over on my FriendFeed discussion page (which I call the World Wide Talk Show).

I love the idea of Google Reader’s new “share note” feature, but find it lacking in implementation — watch along in this video review.

What’s really wrong with it?

1. It’s breaking on my machines. No way to cancel note that I can see, and UI is not coming up. I’m sure that’s a temporary problem, so let’s discount that.

2. It’s causing a LOT of new duplication of items (which was a major problem in Google Reader before this, but is even worse after). Why? Well, I share one item, then I decide “I’d like add a note to that” so I click “share with note.” Now it shares it again with the note added on.

3. No way I can see of removing the note once it’s shared.

4. Unlike FriendFeed, I can’t add a note to other people’s shared items.

5. Unlike FriendFeed we can’t see threaded discussion under the headlines.

6. I can’t figure out a keyboard shortcut.

Speaking of FriendFeed. Check out the commentary about this feature. I’m sharing the best sites I see that talk about it. Welcome to the World Wide Talk Show.

UPDATE: I just added a video comment on TechCrunch’s post about this. Seesmic posts are pretty cool. This time the actual UI worked fine, but the post was shared twice.

Ballmer and Microsoft are the losers. Yahoo and Google win. See the chart from the day when Microsoft announced it was trying to buy Yahoo.

Now do you understand why Bloomberg says that there’s new pressure on Ballmer?

And why Ballmer is now out in the press trying to pitch that Microsoft has an Internet strategy?

Now you’ve seen everything.

Today we were at Ansel Adams’ house and this is me getting a seat in the sink where he made so many of the world’s most favorite images.

I did some videos over on Qik, too, with our “professional” videos of Ansel Adams’ son and home and business coming soon to FastCompany.tv.

Frederick Johnson, who works at Adobe on the Lightroom team, blogged about our visit (we interviewed him too — it was real interesting to hear about the past and future of darkrooms all in one place).

Well, just spent the past four hours watching FriendFeed for interesting discussions about the Yahoo/Microsoft deal. This is the result. Page-after-page of conversations. It’s like a new talk show. There’s even an audio talk show that I participated in during this time. Do you see it on the feed? This is the new conversation. Now compare to Techmeme’s conversations about the same. It has a totally different feel, don’t ya think?

Which do you find more interesting, why?